Making EACs a Liquid Commodity With Infrastructure: Traditional Finance & Energy Attribute Certificates (EACs)

Depending on how you look at them (as a trading opportunity, a compliance risk, or an energy transition tool), Energy Attribute Certificates currently still sit in an awkward, yet exciting, place between commodity market, compliance instrument, and administrative paperwork. If you are a corporate buyer, that usually means you can procure EACs , report emissions under frameworks such as the GHG Protocol , and maybe even hedge some exposure, but the asset itself remains stubbornly less liquid than it ought to be - mostly operating through a dotted ecosystem of legacy players and digital platforms . As a quick note, if you're seeking a more general intro to trading terminology, we put together an introduction to the trading of GOs based on AIB statistics .

Why do EACs still fail to behave like a genuinely liquid financial asset?

EAC markets are currently hard to use. That is not because supply or demand is poor or inconsistent, but speaks to a more apparent, underlying problem with the underlying infrastructure.

• How EACs move (trivial)
• How EACs are accessed and used (the real problem)

As an overview, how assets currently move is solved in each region by fundamental government transfer systems like the AIB hub for EECS Guarantees of Origin (GOs) , designed for foundational, certificate-level interoperability between countries. But, to access, transfer and use moved assets , a real issue emerges: teams must hop platforms between their procurement location to the fragmented government-operated registries holding the assets.

Nearly all procurement interfaces (various exchanges, consultants, brokers, and marketplace platforms) are lacking in high-quality integrations at the registry layer, due to the vast majority of registries not offering an API. While missing APIs increases the integration challenge from an engineering perspective, Soldera acts on the need for robust integration, universally. We saw that for new market entrants, rather than looking at a picture of a singular financial market, a messy mosaic emerges that leads users to settle for a suboptimal experience. They enter expecting a clean and predictable financial-market experience, but leave wondering "what would actually make EACs feel more like a convenient, liquid asset?"

To be precise: liquidity is really about trading outcomes: immediacy (how quickly you can trade), price certainty (predictable fees and low slippage), and depth (placing sizeable orders), not market structure, by default. But even so, EAC market structure influences these constrained outcomes, making liquidity a structural issue. The simple answer here: it's not just more trading volume or free float needed (in fact, issuance and cancellations are both currently rising year-on-year), but instead:

• Fewer extractive intermediaries billing for market access
• Coordinated cross-border settlement without requiring registry accounts in every country
• Better interoperability between platforms
• Transparent prices that are fetched live

What a financialised EAC market lacks:

Trading individual EACs is still niche and performed by a handful of trading houses that dominate the market. Turning a niche commodity into a more widespread, exciting instrument starts with using infrastructure systems capable of facilitating complex international orders from a single place, rather than using a scattered network of platforms that treat EACs like awkward attachments to power deals. The user experience still breaks at exactly the points finance teams care about most: cross-registry transfers, healthy price discovery, settlement certainty, and audit-grade ownership records that survive beyond a single trade. The infrastructure gap is easier to see when you look at what, up until now, has been missing:

• A dashboard for cross-registry actions that are locally compliant (Not just using Norwegian accounts for local cancellations, which is a highly dubious practice revolving around grey-areas of governance and the misinterpretation of ex-domain cancellation logic)
• Real-time APIs and developer tooling for international registry actions
• Reliable liquidity for non-vanilla, differentiated certificate products ( e.g EKOenergy-labelled certificates ).
• Execution processes that come with built-in, audit-ready cancellation workflows providing real evidence ( Not proxy certificates )
• A clean bridge between EACs , PPAs , and broader renewable management.

What would make corporates treat EACs more like tradable commodities?

Soldera noticed the irony of the buyer experience: EAC liquidity is being constrained more by operational friction than by any other missing characteristic of a developed market.

EACs are only truly liquid if the buyer can trust its provenance, move it across the relevant stack, understand its market boundary, and convert it into a defensible claim for themselves or a customer without igniting a tedious chain of emails, PDFs and manual registry actions. That is why the next meaningful layer isn't another generic broker or marketplace screen, but procurement that coordinates sourcing, transfers, and cancellation across registries with ease. Put simply, a liquid asset should be easy to source, move, verify, in one web-app.

A marketplace with genuine infrastructure behind it

That is where Soldera earns its relevance both as a marketplace and an infrastructure layer for settlement. It does not replace the government-operated registries underneath, and pretending so would be silly. What it does, instead, is integrate cleanly with all of those registries, providing a unified platform for registry access with an immediately more user-friendly experience for corporates. By collapsing fragmented registry workflows, procurement logic, and cancellation evidence into one operating layer, Soldera has turned EACs into something closer to a usable balance-sheet instrument for an entirely new category of buyers.

As for real-time pricing, Soldera's live pricing from 4000+ onboarded renewable energy production units matters more than another abstract promise of "a liquid marketplace" or market maturity. It's the ability to act quickly, transact at a predictable, reliable price without huge, extractive spreads, and complete international settlement with clear, provable ownership. For the EAC market, that shift is finally underway.