Real trees. Real proof.
Written down in full.

1. Introduction

The market for funding climate action has a proof problem.

In 2023, an investigation into the world's largest carbon-credit certifier found that around 90% of its rainforest offset credits were worthless¹ — they represented deforestation the projects claimed to have prevented, measured against a baseline nobody could observe. In 2024 the same certifier rejected 37 rice-cultivation projects in China² after a review found integrity failures that its own accredited auditors had not caught, and began compensating for roughly 4.5 million credits those projects had over-issued; four of the auditors were suspended the following March. Credits from those projects had already been bought by major corporations to offset their emissions.

The problem was never a shortage of buyers, or of trees to plant. The problem is that a claim about a tree in a distant place is almost impossible for the person paying for it to verify — and a market built on unverifiable claims eventually gets the projects it deserves.

Sapling Network exists to make reforestation verifiable.

Every planting funded through the network is documented before it is counted: a named partner, a paid invoice, geotagged photographs, a partner certificate, and a batch record written to the Solana blockchain carrying the count, the region and the hash of the evidence. The buyer receives a compressed NFT certificate they permanently own. Nothing enters our public counter without that chain of evidence, and anyone can audit any batch down to its on-chain record without asking our permission.

This is where a blockchain earns its place in the design. The value it adds is not efficiency or speculation — it is that a record written to a public chain outlives the organisation that wrote it. A certificate held in a vendor's private database is worth exactly as much as that vendor's continued existence and goodwill. A batch record on Solana can be verified in twenty years by someone who has never heard of us.

Our first application is the crypto industry's own footprint — the sector where the need is well documented, the disclosure obligations are already in force, and the audience understands on-chain proof natively. It is where we start.

2. The Problem

2.1 The market cannot check its own claims

The voluntary carbon market has been in a credibility crisis since 2023. Independent investigations have found large fractions of issued credits to be non-additional, over-credited, or attached to projects that could not be located. Certifiers have revoked credits after issuance; projects have been linked to forced evictions and human-rights violations.

The failures are concentrated in one kind of credit, and which kind decides what evidence can do about it. Most of the credits at the centre of these investigations were avoided-emission credits, and their value rests on a counterfactual: a forest that would have been cleared, and was not. An event that did not happen cannot be observed, so the baseline is an estimate — and the party producing the estimate is paid in proportion to how large it is. When those baselines were re-examined against what actually happened on comparable land, most of the claimed reductions did not survive.

Removal credits rest on a different claim: trees were planted, they are standing, and they can be counted, photographed, geolocated and measured. Removals are not honest by default — sites get sold twice, survival gets overstated, tonnages get inflated. But each of those failures is the kind a document trail can catch, and a counterfactual has nothing to be checked against.

That distinction runs through the rest of this document. The objection here is to claims nobody can verify, and not to carbon credits as an instrument; Section 13.4 sets out what it means for credits of our own.

The consequence is a market that no longer trusts its own product. Corporate buyers are now subject to stricter disclosure standards and have become far more cautious about credit quality: 41% of buyers now use digital monitoring and verification systems, and high-integrity credits trade at roughly a 3× premium to low-rated ones. Buyers have stopped accepting bare "trees planted" counters. A programme that cannot produce GPS coordinates, survival rates and third-party evidence is increasingly indefensible to a board.

Demand for climate funding has not disappeared. Demand for unverifiable climate funding has.

2.2 The crypto industry's own footprint

Blockchain's environmental record is uneven and improving. Ethereum's 2022 move to Proof of Stake cut its energy use by over 99.9%³, taking its emissions from roughly 35.4 Mt CO₂e per year to approximately 0.01 Mt. Efficient chains like Solana operate several orders of magnitude below Proof-of-Work systems.

What remains is concentrated: Proof-of-Work mining, Bitcoin above all, still draws on the order of 120–180 TWh annually (Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index)⁴ — comparable to a mid-sized country — with a substantial share still met by fossil fuels. Industry-wide estimates remain in the tens of millions of tonnes of CO₂e per year, overwhelmingly attributable to mining.

The direction matters for our own positioning: the sector's aggregate footprint is falling, and a project whose entire reason for existing depends on crypto staying dirty is a project with a shrinking purpose. Ours does not. Efficient chains still emit, those emissions still deserve to be answered for, and the verification infrastructure we are building is not specific to crypto at all.

2.3 No accountability by default

Most blockchain ecosystems externalise their environmental cost. Emissions from transactions, infrastructure and mining are rarely measured, offset, or transparently reported at the level of the individual user or application. Where offsetting does happen, it typically means purchasing credits from the same voluntary market described in 2.1 — inheriting its integrity problems along with its certificates.

Users and applications contribute to a footprint they cannot see, and have no straightforward tool to act on it.

2.4 Regulation is arriving as disclosure, not prohibition

The EU's Markets in Crypto-Assets (MiCA) regulation requires a crypto-asset white paper to disclose the environmental impact of the consensus mechanism the asset runs on. One indicator is mandatory for every asset — the total annual electricity consumption of that mechanism — and once consumption passes 500,000 kWh a year, four more become mandatory: renewable share, energy per transaction, greenhouse-gas emissions, and GHG intensity⁵. Solana's network consumption is more than fifteen times that threshold, so the fuller disclosure is the one that applies to anything built on it. New form-and-content requirements for MiCA white papers came into force on 23 December 2025⁶.

More than 250 companies signed the Crypto Climate Accord committing to net zero by 2030. Most are structurally unprepared for it, and the deadline is now close.

This is a tailwind rather than a threat: an obligation to publish a carbon figure creates demand to improve it, and — after the credibility failures of 2.1 — demand to improve it with something a reader can check.

Without deliberate design, cryptocurrency adoption and environmental accountability remain misaligned. Sapling Network is that deliberate design.

3. The Solution

Sapling Network addresses the environmental cost of blockchain through a three-layer sustainability model:

Layer 1 — Minimal footprint by architecture

Sapling Network operates on Solana, whose Proof-of-History-assisted Proof-of-Stake design eliminates energy-intensive mining. An average Solana transaction consumes roughly 658 joules — about 0.00018 kWh, or several orders of magnitude below Proof-of-Work systems (Solana Foundation Energy Use Report, December 2023). Choosing the most efficient settlement layer keeps the footprint we are answering for as small as it can be in the first place — we do not offset it, and 13.4 says why.

Layer 2 — Funding real reforestation

Sapling Network embeds tree planting directly into its economy. Tree purchases, staking activity, and ecosystem fees fund reforestation executed through established planting partners, who carry the volume, alongside a deliberately smaller share planted by the community for participation and local presence (Sections 8.1 and 9). Community planting grows only as the accountability behind it does: a volunteer network scales safely once a Senior Member who misreports has something at stake, and stake-backed verification is the condition we are designing toward. Until it exists, partners carry the volume.

• A mature tree absorbs approximately 22 kg of CO₂ per year — a mid-range assumption rather than a measurement of our own; the range behind it, and what would replace it, are in 13.1⁷
• Every planting batch is documented with GPS data, photographic evidence, and partner certificates, anchored on-chain
• Reforestation additionally restores biodiversity, soil, and local ecosystems

Layer 3 — Radical transparency

Every tree counted by Sapling Network must be provable. Planting records are published to a public dashboard, verification data is anchored on Solana, and each user's contribution is represented by a compressed NFT certificate they permanently own. No proof, no counter increment — ever.

4. Why Solana?

Sapling Network is built on Solana for four reasons:

1. Energy efficiency. At about 658 joules per transaction (~0.00018 kWh, the Foundation's December 2023 figure) and a gross network footprint of roughly 3,551 tCO₂ a year (derived in Section 13.3), Solana is among the most climate-efficient L1s in production — the natural home for an environmental protocol.
2. A reachable flagship goal. Because Solana's total footprint is small — roughly 3,551 tCO₂ a year — outgrowing it with verified trees is achievable rather than aspirational. Sapling Network's headline milestone is to plant enough verified trees that their own measured, mortality-discounted absorption exceeds that figure, making the Solana ecosystem carbon-negative on directly verifiable removal. Section 13.3 sets out the arithmetic this requires — roughly 202,000 trees planted — the roadmap phase it lands in, why the trees have to mature before the claim can be made, and what the claim does and does not mean.
3. Cost structure. Sub-cent transaction fees make micro-rewards, per-tree NFT certificates, and Round-Up donations economically viable.
4. Ecosystem maturity. Deep DeFi liquidity, compressed NFTs for near-zero-cost certificates, and battle-tested tooling.

5. The SAPN Token

5.1 Fixed supply — verifiable on-chain

SAPN's supply can never increase. The token's mint authority and freeze authority have been permanently revoked on-chain, which any user can independently verify on Solana explorers. There is no mechanism — including for the team — to create additional tokens or freeze user accounts.

5.2 Token history and the v1 → v2 migration

Sapling Network's origins predate this whitepaper: the original SAPN token (E52bRrLGu1YFHBLNTWhdeGoYKyp1UYCTjB7XPoFgapYS) was minted by the founding wallet in September 2021. Its on-chain metadata, however, was registered in that era through a third-party service that retained metadata update authority — an unacceptable long-term risk for the project's integrity.

In July 2026, the same founding wallet minted the current SAPN token with fully self-owned metadata, and the entire 100,000,000 supply of v1 was permanently burned (v1 supply on-chain: 0). No v1 tokens were ever sold or distributed, so no holder was affected. The complete history — 2021 origin, 2026 migration, burn transaction — is publicly auditable on-chain.

6. Tokenomics

6.1 Allocation (100,000,000 SAPN)

Treasury pools are held in multi-signature wallets, and all treasury movements are published on the transparency dashboard.

6.2 Emission schedule — continuous decay over 14 years

The 40M community reward pool is the only source of staking rewards and tree yield (planting rewards come from the planting budget instead, 9.3). It is released on a fixed, continuously declining schedule:

E(t) = E₀ × 2^(−t/4)

where t is years since launch and E₀ is the initial rate. (Every symbol used in this document is listed with its unit, value and provenance in Appendix A.) E₀ is not chosen; it is solved from the two commitments that define the curve — that it runs fourteen years and releases exactly 40,000,000 SAPN. Integrating E(t) over that period and setting the result to 40,000,000 gives E₀ ≈ 7,603,536 SAPN/year. Emission halves every four years, but it does so continuously — every month is slightly lower than the last, by roughly 1.4%. The schedule runs 14 years and distributes exactly 40,000,000 SAPN.

Each year emits about 16% less than the one before.

Why not step halvings. The obvious alternative — a Bitcoin-style schedule that holds emission flat for years and then cuts it in half overnight — is familiar, and we rejected it deliberately. A step halving means every staker and tree owner wakes up one morning to find their rate cut by 50%. The projects that have failed most publicly in this sector did not run out of money; they collapsed when a headline rate fell off a cliff and confidence went with it. Continuous decay removes the cliff entirely: the largest month-over-month change in this schedule is about 1.4%, against 50% for a step halving. Nobody is ever surprised.

The schedule is a ceiling, not a faucet. Rewards are only distributed to active stakers and tree owners, up to the caps in Sections 9–10. Any portion of a period's emission that is not earned stays in the pool and extends the reward runway beyond year fourteen. Emissions are never "airdropped" to meet the schedule.

What happens to emission that is never earned. In the early years most of it will not be. Circulating supply is small at first, so even at full participation and the highest cap the amount that can be earned is a fraction of the year's ceiling — at roughly 3% circulating, on the order of a twentieth of it. The remainder does not expire and it is not redistributed by anyone's decision.

The curve does not stop at year fourteen. It runs until the pool is empty. Fourteen years is how long this schedule takes to release 40,000,000 if every period is fully earned. Every period that is not fully earned leaves a balance, and the same formula keeps releasing against that balance at the same declining rate afterwards. So the runway is longer than fourteen years, and exactly how much longer depends on participation rather than on us.

We are stating this because the alternative — an undistributed balance with no published release rule — would be a large amount of supply sitting at someone's discretion, and this document does not leave that door open. There is no vote, no unlock event and no new parameter: the rule that governs year fifteen is the rule already written above.

What "exactly 40,000,000" counts. The 40,000,000 above is the emission budget: the amount of previously unreleased supply this schedule can ever move into circulation. It is a hard limit and it does not move.

Recycling (6.4) is a different flow. SAPN spent on saplings is already circulating, and half of it returns to the pool to be distributed again. So the cumulative amount distributed over the life of the pool can exceed 40,000,000, while the amount of new supply released never does — and total supply stays at 100,000,000 either way, because recycled tokens were counted the day they were sold. The two statements are about different quantities, and we separate them here because read together they look like a contradiction.

This matters more than it may appear. In the first year, circulating supply is roughly 8–13% of maximum (Section 8.3), so even at very high staking participation only a small fraction of the year's ceiling can actually be earned — the rest simply stays in the pool. The schedule above is the maximum shape of release, not a forecast of it.

6.3 What replaces emission as the pool runs down

Sapling Network will never mint new SAPN to refill rewards — the mint authority is permanently revoked, and no transaction tax or fee-on-transfer mechanism will be introduced to compensate (beyond making the token incompatible with DEX routers and exchange listings, a hidden tax would just be inflation by another name). Two things soften and eventually replace the fixed emission instead:

1. Recycling adds a second flow — when it runs. Per Section 6.4, half of every sapling-package purchase paid in SAPN returns to the community reward pool. That is already-circulating supply rather than new emission, so it does not enlarge the 40,000,000 budget; it gives the pool a separate stream to distribute, which is the distinction drawn in 6.2. SAPN settlement is not enabled yet, so this stream is zero today.
2. Real yield takes over from emission. As Sapling Network DEX and corporate planting revenue (Section 8) come online from 2030, staking rewards progressively shift from token emission to protocol revenue — swap fees and corporate planting margins used to buy SAPN back from the open market and distribute it to stakers, the way Bitcoin's security budget shifts from block subsidy to transaction fees over time. This is a market buyback funded by real income, not new issuance: circulating supply is unaffected either way.

By the time emission has tapered to a small fraction of its opening rate — around year fourteen on the schedule, later in practice for the reason given in 6.2 — the goal is for real yield to already cover a majority of staking rewards, making the transition a glide path rather than a cliff. We will publish the revenue-to-rewards ratio on the transparency dashboard so this transition is measurable, not promised.

6.4 Utility & demand drivers

SAPN is used for staking, governance participation and Senior Member elections, access to premium ecosystem features, and (post-DEX) fee discounts. Tree packages are priced in USD and settle in USDC today — settlement in SAPN is part of the design and is not enabled yet.

The recycling loop, once SAPN settlement opens. Half of every SAPN spent on a sapling package returns to the community reward pool and half funds new planting. Recycled SAPN is supply that is already circulating, so it does not add to the 40,000,000 emission budget; it is a second flow alongside it, which is the distinction 6.2 draws. Today the loop carries nothing, and no figure in this document assumes otherwise.

6.5 Treasury custody and distribution transparency

Allocation tables mean nothing if every token sits in one wallet controlled by one person. We treat custody as part of tokenomics, not as an operational footnote.

Current state (honest disclosure). The full 100,000,000 SAPN supply is held in a Squads 2-of-3 multisig — multisig AirMorb4M2DFHRFkD7RPkjV2TbBDckWiRTHS1vpT1zNS, vault CCtq1NJPkHNKYrkBSGvrSv7Meaq9ye1mBGVn2CVqeBJY — moved there from the founding wallet Dj5hgRLjFm6WigycUyQpQi7wRgbXV2gWg4Zutaf29gUL on 23 August 2026. The metadata update authority moved with it. Nothing has been sold, distributed, or promised to any private party — there is no seed round, no private allocation, and no unnamed early investor. Concentration exists because distribution has not started, not because it is hidden.

What this multisig does, and what it does not. The founder holds two of the three keys; the third is held separately. So the founder can still act alone, and this is not the distributed structure in the table below — it does not claim to be. What it removes is the failure that would actually have ended this project: a single lost or compromised key taking the entire supply with it, permanently and with no recovery. Before any distribution there is no counterparty to protect from the founder; there is only a project to protect from an accident.

It was tested before it was trusted. One token was sent to the vault and withdrawn again through the full approval flow before the supply followed, and a single approval was confirmed on-chain to be insufficient to move funds. The transactions are public.

Target state (before TGE). The supply is split across dedicated, publicly labelled wallets, and every pool that is not immediately circulating moves under Squads multi-signature control on Solana:

Commitments. Every wallet address above is published on the transparency dashboard and in this whitepaper before the token sale opens. Team tokens are locked by contract, not by promise — nobody, including the founder, can move them ahead of schedule. Treasury sales that fund planting follow a published, volume-capped schedule so the treasury never sells into its own community. Any change to this structure is announced before it happens.

7. Token Sale

Use of proceeds: 40% reforestation fund (immediate, verifiable planting), 30% DEX liquidity (locked), 30% operations & marketing.

The remaining 15M tokens of the sale & liquidity pool are reserved for the initial liquidity pool and potential later rounds, subject to governance disclosure. The team commits to publishing every sale-proceeds transaction on the transparency dashboard.

Vesting and liquidity discipline: sale vesting is enforced by audited on-chain vesting contracts — not manual promises. The initial liquidity position is locked, and is deliberately sized so that its value at listing exceeds the maximum value unlockable at TGE (30% of proceeds ≈ $15,000 in liquidity vs. ≤ $12,500 of TGE-unlocked tokens at the sale price) — the launch cannot be structurally under-collateralized against its own unlock.

When this sale can happen. Section 16 requires a legal entity to hold the treasury and act as counterparty before the sale opens, and that entity is not registered yet. The terms in this section are settled; the date is not, and Section 14 explains why it prints none. Nothing in this section should be read as a commitment to a quarter.

Sale venue: application submitted to an established launchpad; details announced on official channels. In the absence of a launchpad agreement, the sale runs on Sapling Network's own platform with identical terms.

8. The Economic Engine: How the Forest Gets Funded

Impact targets are only credible if the money behind them is visible. This section shows what our targets cost, where the funding comes from, and how the token economy sustains the loop.

8.1 What a tree costs, and what we charge for it

Planting cost is a curve, not a constant. Established reforestation partners publish per-tree rates well below what a retail donor pays, but the low rates come with volume commitments: Eden: People+Planet plants for $0.10–0.20 per tree depending on country¹¹, and its landscape partnerships begin at $50,000 a year¹⁰ — around 333,000 trees. A project planting 1,000 trees cannot buy at that price, and should not pretend it can.

So our cost per tree falls as we scale, and our early trees are the most expensive we will ever plant:

The counts above are trees planted, which is what the cost is actually incurred on and what the evidence chain can prove (Section 13.1). We do not budget for topping a standing population back up to a round number, because we could not verify when that was needed.

The figures above are estimates, published so they can be checked against what we actually pay.

Who does the planting. The great majority of trees are planted by established reforestation organisations with their own field operations, insurance and certification. This is deliberate on two counts: they can absorb volume a volunteer community cannot, and they already run the verification apparatus — trained field teams, survival tracking, documented chains of custody — that would otherwise take us years and a great deal of money to build badly. Our contribution is not to replace their verification but to make it permanent and public.

Community planting by Senior Members (Section 12.2) continues alongside, at a deliberately small share of the total. Its purpose is participation and local presence — including in Türkiye, where our largest partners do not operate — rather than volume.

8.1.1 The pricing rule

Prices are set in USD and settled in USDC. Where a SAPN amount appears anywhere in this document or in the product, it is a derived display: the USD price converted at the Section 7 sale price of $0.01 until a market price exists, and at the live market rate afterwards. The USD figure is the price. The SAPN figure is what that price happens to be worth at the moment it is shown, and it moves.

Tree packages are currently priced at $1.50 per tree. This is a published parameter, not a commitment: it tracks partner costs and is kept current on the transparency dashboard. Price changes are announced at least 30 days in advance and apply only to new purchases — the SAPN recorded against an existing certificate, and therefore its yield under Section 9.3, never changes.

To make sure the parameter cannot drift into a markup as our costs fall, it is bound by a published rule:

P ≤ 2C + 2F

where P is the retail package price, C is the documented weighted-average partner cost per tree for the preceding quarter, and F = $0.20 is the maximum operating margin we may take per tree.

The factor of two reflects the circulation loop in Section 8.3: half of every SAPN payment returns to the community reward pool rather than reaching the treasury, so the treasury's share of a price P is P/2, out of which it pays C and retains at most F.

What the rule does at each stage of the cost curve:

Only one row is a measurement, and it is a small one: a single invoice for twelve mangroves planted through Tree-Nation on 5 September 2026, €4.00 in total, €0.333 per tree — $0.39 at the ECB reference rate of 1 EUR = 1.1622 USD. This figure replaces the $1.00 that stood here previously. That $1.00 was an estimate carrying a measurement's label, which is the error this table exists to prevent, and it was wrong in the direction that flattered us: our real cost is lower, and a lower cost binds the price rule tighter.

Mangroves in Tanzania sit at the cheap end of what partners charge, so $0.39 is a real number but not a representative one; other species and other partners cost more, and a blended average will land above it. Twelve trees is not a quarter, either. The rule defines C as the documented weighted average for the preceding quarter, so this number is recomputed when the first full quarter closes and other partners and species enter the average. The rows beneath it are assumed future costs, shown to demonstrate what the rule does as volume grows — they are not forecasts we are committing to, and the price only moves when the cost underneath it is documented. (Appendix A explains this vocabulary.)

Whether the rule binds depends on a number we do not have yet. On the single invoice above the ceiling would be $1.18, below the $1.50 we charge. But one invoice for twelve trees is not a quarter, and the planting that fills the rest of it is a different species: First Grove is planned at €0.50 a tree — $0.58 — at which the ceiling is $1.56 and the price sits inside it.

Neither figure is the one the rule uses. That is the blend of everything invoiced in the quarter, computed when the quarter closes and published beside the price. The threshold is $0.55: below it the price comes down, above it $1.50 stands. We are naming the threshold in advance so that the answer is not ours to choose after seeing the number.

What does not change either way: price changes are announced at least 30 days ahead, apply only to new purchases, and never alter the SAPN recorded against a certificate already issued.

Definitions and review. "Documented cost" means the weighted average of partner invoices for the quarter, published alongside the price so the rule can be checked rather than trusted. F is reviewed annually and published with actual costs. Our intention is to reduce it as scale allows; raising it would require exceptional circumstances and 30 days' notice. We are not committing to specific future values of F, because we do not yet know what verification operations cost at a million trees, and a cap we cannot meet would be worse than a conservative one we can.

Which way the rule cuts. The factor of two exists because half of a SAPN payment recycles to the reward pool, so the treasury receives P/2. At $1.50 that is $0.75 against a documented cost of $0.39, leaving $0.36 per tree — above the $0.20 ceiling on operating margin. The gap between $0.36 and $0.20 is the whole reason P is capped at 2C + 2F, and closing it means moving the price, not the cap. The ceiling reaches $1.50 only at C = $0.55. The single documented invoice is below that; the planned cost is above it. Which one the quarter resolves to is the question the paragraph above leaves open, and it is answered by arithmetic rather than by us.

At the planned $0.58 the same arithmetic leaves $0.17, inside the cap, which is the state the rule is built to produce.

Settlement changes the arithmetic, and the difference has a destination. The factor of two exists because half of a SAPN payment returns to the reward pool. USDC does not return, so on a purchase settled in USDC — which is all of them today — the treasury receives P rather than P/2. The amount above C + F is not retained as margin. It enters the operating treasury and is subject to the split published in Section 9.6: 40% to the ring-fenced stewardship reserve, 40% to operations, 20% to contingency. At today's price and the planned partner cost that amount is $0.72 per tree, and it is published as its own line on the transparency dashboard rather than folded into a margin figure. When settlement in SAPN opens the difference narrows on its own, and the rule is reviewed at that point.

This is a launch-phase position, written down here because the purchase page already shows the arithmetic. What the difference does not do is buy SAPN. Revenue from a sapling purchase does not enter the token's market, is not used to support its price, and is not locked into liquidity: Section 16 states that the token carries no claim on the project's revenues, and routing a buyer's payment into the token would create exactly the link that sentence denies. The reserve also has to pay for monitoring years from now, and an obligation with a date on it is not held in a volatile asset.

Earlier versions of this section described the opposite problem: a $0.25 shortfall per tree, on the assumption that partner cost was $1.00. That shortfall does not exist at either figure. Break-even on a purchase paid entirely in SAPN is 2C = $0.78 on the documented cost, and the price is above it, so no share of payments in USDC is required to cover cost.

What we will not do is quietly hold the price above the ceiling: the ceiling is published, the cost is published, and the arithmetic between them is the reader's to check.

What F is not. F is a ceiling on price, not an operating budget. At Phase 1 volumes it amounts to roughly $5,000 a year — nowhere near the cost of running verification. Early operations are funded from the token sale allocation and the treasury (Section 8.2); F becomes a meaningful revenue line only at Phase 3 volumes and beyond.

8.2 Where the funding comes from — phase by phase

Five revenue streams mature in sequence; each phase is carried by the streams already live:

1. Token sale planting allocation (2026–27). 40% of the $50,000 raise — $20,000 — is earmarked exclusively for planting. At the costs in 8.1 this pre-funds First Grove (~$580 at its planned €0.50 per tree) and the whole of Phase 1 (~$14,400 at its assumed blended cost), with roughly $5,000 unallocated.

1. Tree packages (from TGE). Individuals buy verified plantings at the current published price ($1.50 per tree today, bound by the rule in 8.1.1), USD-indexed and settling in USDC today — settlement in SAPN is designed and not yet enabled (8.1.1). USDC payments fund planting directly and the treasury retains at most F per tree, allocated on the fixed rule in Section 9.6. When SAPN settlement opens, half of every SAPN payment will return to the reward pool and the treasury's half will fund planting (8.3); and any treasury conversions needed to pay planting partners follow a published, volume-capped schedule so the treasury never sells against its own community.

1. Staking conversion (from TGE). The minimum planting share on staking rewards (Section 10.1) converts a fixed proportion of every staking reward into verified saplings. This is not a sales channel and requires no counterparty: it scales automatically with staking participation.

1. Protocol integrations (2027+). Other applications route a share of their own fees to verified planting and receive an on-chain record of what they funded. This is described in 8.4; it is our primary B2B line and the one we expect to compound.

1. Direct corporate planting and treasury conversion (2028+). Volume planting agreements with companies (8.5), plus gradual, published conversion of the 15M SAPN reforestation treasury into planting capital.

Which stream funds which phase, and why the arithmetic matters. The early phases are carried by the sale allocation and by tree packages bought one at a time. The later phases are not, and cannot be: at Phase 3's 2,500,000 trees, buying every tree as a retail package would call for more SAPN than will ever exist. Phase 3 and Phase 4 are carried by streams 4 and 5 — fee routing and corporate agreements — which are priced in USD, settled in USDC, and costed at the partner rates in 8.1 (roughly $338,000 and $900,000) rather than at a retail price. A reader who does the arithmetic from the retail price lands on an impossible number, and should not have to discover the answer as though it were a contradiction.

The commitment rule: trees are committed only after funds are in the treasury — we pre-fund, we don't promise. Supply is fixed, so impact is never financed by minting or debt. If a phase's revenue lags, its target shifts in time; it does not get quietly diluted.

8.3 The token circulation loop

• Demand: SAPN is used for locked staking, preferential settlement by integration partners, and governance. Tree packages settle in USDC today; SAPN settlement is designed and not yet enabled (8.1.1).
• Locks: staking (6–12 months), team vesting (4 years), sale vesting (6 months), locked liquidity.
• Recycling — not running yet: when SAPN settlement opens, of every SAPN spent on tree packages 50% returns to the community reward pool and 50% flows to the treasury to fund the next trees. Recycled SAPN is already in circulation, so this adds a distributable flow rather than enlarging the 40,000,000 emission budget (6.2).
• Release: new circulating supply enters only through the fixed emission schedule and published vesting — there is no other faucet.

Illustrative circulating supply: ~3% of max supply at TGE (1.25M sale unlock + ~1.5M initial locked liquidity), rising with sale vesting and earned rewards to an estimated 8–13% by the end of year one and 15–25% by the end of year two. These are ceilings, not targets — because emissions are only distributed to active stakers and tree owners (6.2), actual float depends on participation, and staking locks pull the effective float lower still.

8.4 Protocol integrations — the primary B2B line

An application on Solana routes an agreed share of its own fee revenue to the reforestation treasury. In return it receives a public, on-chain record of the plantings it funded, and a verification page it can embed in its own interface.

The mechanics are deliberately small: a fee split configured once, and a batch record that accumulates against the partner's address. There is no invoicing cycle, no annual renewal, and no minimum commitment. The partner's contribution scales with the partner's own volume.

Why this rather than selling companies their own footprint. We modelled the alternative — applications buying enough trees to neutralise their share of network emissions — and it does not support a business. A Solana transaction consumes about 658 joules, roughly 0.074 grams of CO₂e at the carbon intensity derived in Section 13.3. A single mature tree absorbs about 22 kg per year, which is the annual footprint of roughly 297,000 transactions. Neutralising the network's entire gross annual footprint therefore needs roughly 202,000 trees planted — the same figure as the Section 13.3 benchmark, because it is the same calculation. At today's $1.50 package that is about $300,000 a year for the whole ecosystem; split across its active applications, a typical application's own footprint costs a few thousand dollars a year to neutralise. Those are real numbers, and they are the problem: an entire addressable market of $300,000 a year does not support a sales process, a quota, or the people you would have to hire to work it.

Fee routing scales on a different axis. It is proportional to the partner's throughput rather than its emissions, which is both far larger and far more durable:

Ten partners at the middle of that range is on the order of $24,000 a year in recurring planting revenue; fifty is $120,000. These are illustrations, not projections.

What this arithmetic says, and what it does not. A transaction's footprint is very small beside a tree's absorption, so even a token fee share funds planting far out of proportion to the traffic that produced it: a $100 swap paying a 0.05% fee, with 10% of that routed to planting, funds on the order of a thousand times the absorption its own transaction's footprint would call for. The comparison rests on the 22 kg in 13.1, which is assumed rather than measured, so it is an illustration of scale and not an accounting.

It is not a neutralisation, and we do not present it as one. Consistent with 8.5 and 13.4, what a routing partner receives is a contribution claim, not a compensation claim: they funded verifiable planting, and no quantity of anyone's emissions is represented as offset by it. What they can show is the thing we can evidence — how many trees, planted by whom, where, and the record anchored on-chain. We publish the arithmetic so the proportion can be checked rather than taken on trust.

Sapling Network DEX is the first integration, not the last. Sapling Network DEX (Section 14, 2030+) is this same fee-share mechanism applied to our own product — which is also how we intend to answer the first question any prospective partner will ask, which is who else is using it.

8.5 Direct corporate planting

Companies also buy verified plantings directly, as sustainability spend rather than as carbon accounting. Pricing is tiered by volume and falls with scale:

At $0.50 all-in cost, every tier funds planting, verification and a contribution to operations.

We are explicit about where we compete. Established providers sell corporate tree planting from roughly $0.43 per tree with their own verification, and we do not intend to win on price. What we offer instead is proof that outlives us: our evidence chain is anchored on a public blockchain, not held in a vendor database. A buyer who wants to demonstrate in 2040 what they funded in 2027 can do so from the chain, whether or not Sapling Network still exists. For buyers who do not need that, the cheaper providers are a reasonable choice and we will say so.

Consistent with Section 16, these are contribution claims, not compensation claims: the buyer has funded verifiable reforestation. They have not purchased a carbon credit, and we do not represent the trees as offsetting a specific quantity of their emissions for regulatory accounting.

9. Plant-to-Earn & Verification

Plant-to-Earn (P2E) lets users generate real environmental impact — and earn from it.

9.1 How trees get planted

• Partner planting (Phase 1): Users purchase tree packages in the app; plantings are executed by established reforestation partners. Pricing is USD-indexed and settles in USDC; settlement in SAPN is designed and not yet enabled (8.1.1).
• Community planting (Phase 2+): Verified Senior Members accept planting tasks near their location (minimum batch: 10 trees), follow the documented planting procedure, and submit evidence.

9.2 Verification — no proof, no tree

Every planting is verified before it counts:

1. Planting area is registered on restor.eco with location data
2. Before/after photographs and tree counts are submitted through the app
3. A community manager reviews the evidence
4. The batch is anchored on-chain: batch ID, tree count, GPS region, certificate hash
5. The planter receives their reward; the buyer receives a compressed NFT certificate per tree

Funding a tree and planting one are different events. A partner receipt usually merges them, and ours did: our first purchase through a planting platform is dated the day we paid, states a species and a count, and carries a footnote saying the sponsorship may correspond to a tree planted in a later season — which, for those trees, is months away. Recording that as a planting would have been untrue on the day it was written, in the ordinary way nobody intends.

So a record says which of the two it is. A planting carries a date, a site and a photograph of that site. A sponsorship carries the date the money moved and the paper that proves it, and it cannot carry a planting date at all — the schema rejects one. The honest form is the only form available, rather than the one we have to remember to pick. Sponsorships do not enter the public counter. When the planting is evidenced, a planting record is written and points back at the sponsorship it discharges.

What is owed, and what has been delivered. Both sides are already on Solana and neither needs our word for it:

The first four are obligations, the last is delivery, and the difference between the two totals is what the network still owes the people who paid. Anyone can compute it by reading the treasury address; we publish the same number and it is checkable against the chain rather than against us.

This is also what integration means here. A wallet, an application routing its fees, or a page we have not built yet does not connect to anything of ours — it writes the memo, and the obligation exists whether or not we noticed. We cannot forget what we did not record. One caveat: a memo written by a buyer is stronger evidence than a memo written by us, because the buyer had no reason to write it in our favour. The published reconciliation keeps the two apart instead of adding them into one comforting total.

Where the evidence lives. The batch record carries a SHA-256 for every piece of evidence, so a reader can prove the bytes they hold are the bytes that were anchored — whichever copy they got them from. The files themselves are stored on Arweave, paid for once and held by its endowment, and the site keeps a mirror. This matters because of the claim in Section 1: a hash anchored permanently on-chain proves nothing if the file it points at sits on a domain that has to be renewed every year. One missed renewal and every certificate's evidence is gone while the hash still points confidently at nothing.

Arweave has no delete. A photograph uploaded by mistake stays public permanently and no takedown request can be honoured, so evidence photographs must not contain identifiable people. This is a constraint on us, not a feature, and we state it because it is one we cannot undo.

The certificate points there too. A compressed NFT's address is fixed at the moment it is minted and can never be changed. Ours used to point at this website, which meant every certificate ever issued depended on a domain being renewed each year — and on whoever held that domain next. The certificate metadata is now published to Arweave as well, and that is the address minted into each certificate; the copy on this site remains as a mirror, byte for byte identical. It is the same argument as the paragraph above, applied to the document the certificate itself points at.

9.3 Earning

Two things earn SAPN from planting. They come from different places, and neither is new supply.

Planting rewards — from the planting budget, not from emission. A Senior Member who plants and documents a batch (12.2) is doing the work we would otherwise pay a partner for, so the reward comes out of the same line: the budget already set aside for those trees.

The bound follows from that and is a commitment: the reward for a tree can never exceed C, the documented partner cost in 8.1.1 — $0.39 today, and it moves when C moves. Above C, community planting would cost more than partner planting, and the reason for doing it at all would be gone.

C is the documented figure, not the planned one: 8.1.1 keeps those apart, and a ceiling written against a cost we have not paid yet would be a ceiling we made up.

What the figure is within that bound depends on something not yet settled: whether the planter also supplies the saplings or we do. Community planting is a Phase 2 mechanism (9.1) and has not started, so the split is published when it opens rather than guessed at here. The ceiling is fixed now; the division is not, and this document does not print a number it has not worked out.

Why not a slice of emission. The obvious alternative is to reserve a share of the reward pool for planting rewards. We rejected it: community planting does not begin until Phase 2, so that share would sit unearned for years while reducing what stakers receive today. Paying from the planting budget ties the reward to work actually done — when nobody plants, nothing is paid, and nothing idles.

Tree yield — from emission. Every tree cNFT generates an ongoing SAPN yield for its owner, funded from the 25% of emission reserved for tree yield. Two rules govern it, and the lower of the two always applies:

y = min( Eₜ / N , c × p )

where y is the yield paid to one tree's owner for the period, Eₜ is the period's tree-yield emission, N is the total number of verified tree cNFTs, p is the SAPN equivalent recorded on that tree's certificate at purchase — the USD paid, converted at the reference rate in force that day and then frozen — and c is the yield cap: 10% per year, fixed for the life of the schedule.

p at today's published prices. A package costs $1.50 (Section 8.1.1) and SAPN sold at $0.01 (Section 7), so p = 150 SAPN and the cap c × p = 15 SAPN per tree per year. Every figure below that converts SAPN into trees uses this basis, and states it. That conversion is fixed on the certificate at purchase and never re-derived. This is what keeps the yield rate stable and requires no oracle: the live SAPN display elsewhere in the product moves with the market, and this recorded figure does not. A tree bought at a different USD price, or at a different reference rate, carries its own p — the certificate records it, and that record is what the formula reads.

Two design choices exist to prevent problems we can foresee:

The cap is a share of what you paid, not a fixed SAPN amount. Tree packages are USD-indexed, so a fixed SAPN cap would silently change meaning as the token price moves: the same 15 SAPN/year that is a 10% yield at one price becomes a 100% yield at ten times that price. Expressing the cap as a percentage of the SAPN actually paid keeps the rate identical regardless of price, requires no oracle, and is trivially auditable — the purchase price is recorded in the certificate itself.

The cap only binds while the forest is small. With a fixed pool split across every tree, a small forest would otherwise produce absurd per-tree yields — a thousand trees sharing a pool sized for millions. The cap holds the rate at 10% until the forest is large enough that the proportional share falls below it on its own. At first-year emission that crossover is roughly 116,000 trees — Eₜ ÷ (c × p) = 1,745,300 ÷ 15 — and it arrives earlier every year as emission declines: about 58,000 trees by year five and 24,000 by year ten. So the cap is a scaffold for the opening phase, not a permanent feature: it stops binding somewhere inside Phase 2 and never binds again, which is why it never needs to be adjusted. Emission not paid out because of the cap stays in the pool and extends the reward runway. It is not minted, burned, or redirected.

9.4 Reinvestment — optional compounding

Tree owners may direct any share of their tree yield, from 0% to 100%, back into new saplings. The share is chosen by the owner, defaults to 0%, and can be changed at any time.

n_new = (y × N_owned × r) / p_current

where n_new is the number of new saplings the reinvestment funds in a period, y is the tree yield from Section 9.3, N_owned is the number of trees that owner holds, r is the chosen reinvestment share, and p_current is the current SAPN equivalent of a sapling package, converted from its USD price at the live rate. Note that p_current is today's price, not the price originally paid: if SAPN appreciates, the same yield buys more trees; if the package price falls with partner costs, it buys more again.

For the owner, this compounds: at a 10% cap and full reinvestment, a holding grows roughly 10% per year — 100 trees become about 259 after ten years, with the yield from each new tree compounding in turn.

For the system, growth behaves differently in each of the formula's two regimes, so which one we are in changes the answer.

While the cap binds — that is, below the crossover in 9.3, currently about 116,000 trees — every tree earns the same c × p regardless of how many trees exist. At today's prices that is 15 SAPN against a 150 SAPN tree, so a fully reinvesting owner adds 10% a year, and so does the forest as a whole. This is compound growth, and it is the same 10% the worked example above describes. It is also the regime the network is in for the whole of Phase 1 and most of Phase 2.

Once the pool binds — above that crossover — each tree earns Eₜ / N instead, total payout stops at Eₜ, and reinvestment can fund at most Eₜ / p new trees in a period no matter how many owners participate or how large the forest is. There the tree count N genuinely does cancel, growth becomes linear, and the rate falls as the forest grows.

So the brake is real but it engages at a threshold rather than from the start: the system compounds while the forest is small, which is when growth is wanted, and limits itself once the forest is large enough that a fixed pool can no longer sustain the rate. What holds in both regimes is the hard bound — no level of participation can distribute more than the pool emits.

Reinvestment is the mechanism by which emission becomes forest instead of sell pressure. A reward taken as tokens may be sold; a reward taken as trees is planted, verified and recorded. Both are the owner's to choose. The design makes the second easy; it does not assume the first away.

9.5 Stewardship — what we commit to after planting day

A planting is not finished when it is photographed. Someone has to know whether it is still alive three years later, and that costs money for as long as the forest exists. Most planting programmes leave this vague. Here is the line, including where it stops.

What we commit to:

• Verification at planting is permanent. The batch record, geotagged photographs, partner certificate and certificate hash are anchored on-chain and do not expire. This is the part that never needs re-funding.
• Three years of active monitoring per batch. Survival is checked and published for each batch through its third growing season — the period in which most sapling mortality occurs.
• Replanting within the partner guarantee. Losses covered by the planting partner's guarantee are replanted and the batch record is updated to show both the loss and the replacement. We publish the survival rate, not just the planting count.
• Site-level reporting thereafter. After year three, batches are reported at site level using satellite monitoring and periodic sampling. This scales with the number of planting sites rather than the number of trees, which is what makes it sustainable.

What we do not commit to, and why. We do not guarantee the lifetime survival of individual trees, and we will not promise perpetual per-tree monitoring, because that promise cannot be funded. Funding a single tree's monitoring in perpetuity from an endowment would require between $0.30 and $0.75 per tree depending on assumed returns — more than the entire operating margin on a $1.50 sapling. A programme that promises it either intends to break the promise or intends to fund it from money it does not yet have.

Bounded monitoring is fundable: active monitoring costs about $0.045 per tree spread over three years, roughly 22% of the margin, and — because it applies only to recent plantings — this cost falls as planting slows rather than accumulating. Site-level reporting after that is a function of how many places we plant, not how many trees are in them.

9.6 Where the money for this sits

Sapling Network runs one operating treasury, funded by protocol revenue rather than by token allocation, with its uses fixed in advance.

Inflows. The operating margin on tree packages (at most F per tree, Section 8.1.1), the margin on corporate volume planting (Section 8.5), partner fee routing (Section 8.4), and Sapling Network DEX fees once live.

Fixed allocation. Every unit of revenue entering the treasury is split on a published rule:

The stewardship reserve is ring-fenced. It cannot be spent on marketing, salaries, liquidity, or buybacks, and that restriction is enforced by the multisig policy rather than by intention. Its balance is published on the transparency dashboard alongside the tree counter, because a forest with no maintenance budget behind it is a liability being presented as an asset.

Why revenue-funded rather than token-funded. The reforestation treasury (15M SAPN, Section 6.1) is capital for planting. This treasury is for keeping what has been planted, and it is deliberately fed by revenue instead: an obligation that lasts longer than the emission schedule cannot responsibly be funded by the emission schedule.

The honest limit. Beyond roughly year ten, active planting slows and with it the inflow from planting margin, while the number of sites under stewardship does not fall. From that point the stewardship reserve depends on recurring revenue — integrations and DEX fees — rather than on planting margin. This is the same transition described in Section 6.3, applied to costs rather than rewards, and it is a real dependency: if recurring revenue does not materialise, the scope of stewardship narrows to what site-level reporting alone can sustain. We will report the reserve's runway on the dashboard so that this is visible well before it becomes urgent.

10. Staking

Staking rewards come from the community reward pool on the fixed emission schedule. Rates are dynamic: each period's emission is distributed proportionally among stakers.

A staker's reward for a period is weight-based:

w = s × μ → r = min( (w / Σw) × E , s × APY_cap )

where w = the user's stake weight, s = user's staked SAPN, μ = the user's lock multiplier, Σw = the sum of all stakers' weights, E = the period's emission allocated to staking (75% of the period's emission; 25% is reserved for tree yield), and APY_cap = the product's cap rate. Because rewards are shares of a fixed E, multipliers redistribute rewards toward longer locks — they can never inflate total payout above E. Early on, when little is staked, the caps bind (everyone earns their maximum) and unearned emission stays in the pool; as staking grows, rates float below the caps naturally.

APY figures are caps, not guarantees — actual rates depend on total staked supply and decline as emission declines. Early stakers earn the highest rates. Unstaking before lock expiry is not possible; there are no penalty exceptions, which protects committed stakers.

10.1 Every staker is a planter — the minimum planting share

Staking that only turns tokens into more tokens does nothing for the forest. So a minimum share of every staking reward is converted directly into verified saplings, and the staker chooses any share above that minimum, up to 100%.

σ(t) = min( σ₀ + ⌊t/4⌋ × Δ , σ_max )

where σ(t) is the minimum share of a staking reward converted to saplings in year t, t is years since launch, σ₀ = 10%, Δ = 5%, and σ_max = 20%. The schedule is published in full at launch and fixed in the staking contract; it is not adjustable afterwards.

The minimum starts low deliberately. Early on the community is small and token liquidity is thin, so a heavy diversion would deter participation while producing few trees in absolute terms; as the ecosystem matures, both the case for a higher share and the ability to absorb it improve. Publishing the whole schedule up front means the increase is a known term of the product, not a change imposed later.

What the staker actually gives up. Nothing, in value: the diverted share buys saplings that belong to the staker, arrive as tree cNFTs, and generate tree yield of their own under Section 9.3. What the staker gives up is liquidity — a tree certificate is not a token you can sell on an exchange. That is the honest trade, and we state it as one.

Worked example, year 1, at the 12-month cap, at the prices in Section 9.3 (p = 150 SAPN): a staker with 100,000 SAPN earns 14,000 SAPN for the year. 12,600 SAPN arrives as tokens; the remaining 1,400 SAPN — $14.00 at the sale price, and this conversion moves with the market — buys roughly 9 saplings, which then earn tree yield themselves. The staker's liquid return is 12.6%, still well above what liquid staking pays elsewhere on Solana.

Nine trees in the first year is a modest number. It is not rounded up. It is also the smallest the figure ever gets for a staker who stays: the minimum share rises to 15% in year five and 20% from year nine (the schedule above), the same stake therefore converts roughly 14 and then 19 saplings a year at these prices, and every tree already bought keeps earning its own yield underneath. The forest compounds; the headline number is just where it starts.

The converted share never passes through the staker's wallet. It moves from the reward pool to the reforestation treasury directly, and the staker receives tree certificates. This keeps the transaction count low and makes what the staker received unambiguous: saplings, not income that was then spent.

11. The Sapling Network App

The Sapling Network app is where the ecosystem meets the people in it: Android first, in a closed beta on Google Play from Q4 2026 (Section 14). It is not a wallet. It holds no keys and no funds. It connects to the wallet you already use (Phantom or Solflare, through Solana's Mobile Wallet Adapter), and every payment and every signature is shown and approved there, by you.

What it does today

• Fund trees: choose how many trees at the published price and pay in USDC from your own

wallet. The order is a memo on chain, so it shows up in the public order book; the cancellation terms are on the website's Terms page.

• Follow your trees: your orders and cNFT certificates are read from your address, and each

certificate shows how its batch is doing as survival checks come in (9.5).

• Check it yourself: any published record is hashed on the phone and compared with the hash

anchored on Solana (9.2, 13.2). Verified means the record is the one that was anchored, nothing more.

• Plant in the field: a planting session — photographs, positions and a session code

written on a card — sealed and signed on the phone; at an event, a lead signs it off on site (9.1). A practice mode teaches the whole flow without anything being counted.

• Community and rewards: rank from the trees a wallet has funded, the field leaderboard, and

whether the wallet may receive rewards, read from a one-time identity attestation on chain that carries no name, country or date of birth.

• A read-only wallet view: SOL, USDC and SAPN balances and history. Tokens are recognised

by their address, not their name.

What comes later

• Impact profile: the certificates, an estimated CO₂ figure with its method (13.1) and the

rank in one view.

• After TGE — stake: the locked staking products of Section 10, each stake signed in your

own wallet.

• After TGE — Round-Up: an opt-in rounding of the payments you make in the app — $9.90

becomes $10.00 — with the difference funding planting. The rounded amount is shown in your wallet before you sign; nothing is ever taken automatically.

Earlier versions of this paper called it the Sapling Wallet. The name is retired: the app never takes custody, and a name that promised it would was the one thing in it that was not true.

12. Community & Governance

The Sapling Network Community turns users into decision-makers and planters.

12.1 Ranks

12.2 Becoming a Senior Member

Senior Members hold real responsibility — they plant, verify, and govern — so the role is earned, not bought:

• Users in the top 50 of the monthly planting leaderboard may apply. The leaderboard counts field contribution — trees a member planted and documented, and batches they verified — not trees they bought. Purchases fund the forest and are recognised in the rank ladder above, but they do not buy a place on this list, because governance earned by spending is governance sold.
• The top 10 advance automatically after screening and suitability tests
• Remaining candidates are pre-screened by the management team, then elected by a community-wide vote
• Elections conclude when 25 members pass the final suitability tests

This process ensures governance rights are held by people who demonstrably embody the project's ecological mission.

12.3 What a treasury vote actually does

Treasury pools sit in multi-signature wallets held by named signers (6.5). A community vote does not move them, and we are not going to imply otherwise: no vote can compel a signature, and any claim that it could would be untrue for as long as the signers are the people they are.

What an Elder treasury vote does today is advisory and published. The vote is recorded, the result is published on the transparency dashboard, and where the signers do not follow it they say why. That is a weaker instrument than a binding vote, and stating it plainly is the only honest option while custody is still where 6.5 says it is.

Binding on-chain governance requires the treasury to be controlled by a program rather than by signers, which is a change to custody and not to the community section. It is not scheduled, and we will not promise it here.

12.4 Leaderboard

Members earn points for planting trees, verifying batches, and community contributions. The public, real-time leaderboard gamifies impact and feeds the monthly Senior Member elections.

13. Carbon Impact Targets

Honesty first: offsetting the entire crypto industry (~65–90 Mt CO₂e/yr) would require billions of mature trees. That is our generation-scale vision, not a short-term promise. Our targets are staged, funded, and verifiable:

Both absorption columns are computed, not measured: cumulative trees × 22 kg (13.1), the right-hand column then × 0.8. Every absorption figure quoted elsewhere in this document is the discounted one. The tree counts are targets; the live count is on the transparency dashboard.

Progress is tracked live on the transparency dashboard; no tree is counted without verification evidence.

13.1 Measurement methodology

Our absorption figures are deliberately conservative. Each input below is labelled with its status in the sense defined in Appendix A — assumed means we have not measured it yet and will replace it with our own field data when we have enough of it, which for both figures below means after the first two or three planting seasons:

• Per-tree absorption — assumed. We use 22 kg CO₂ per mature tree per year as the baseline — a mid-range figure consistent with commonly cited estimates for mixed-species reforestation (actual rates vary by species, climate, and soil, roughly 10–40 kg/yr). Where planting partners provide species- and region-specific data, we use their certified figures instead.
• Maturity curve: Trees do not absorb at full capacity from day one. Our dashboard reports two numbers separately: projected absorption at maturity (the figures in the table above) and current-year estimated absorption, which ramps up over ~10 years following planting. We never present projected capacity as current impact.
• Mortality buffer — assumed. A fraction of planted saplings does not survive. We apply a 20% mortality discount to all absorption projections, and partner replanting guarantees are tracked per batch.
• Credits sold come out — rule. The figures above project absorption across every tree in the target. A tree whose credit has been sold is still planted and still counted as planted, but its carbon belongs to the buyer, so it leaves this projection (13.2). Each credit issued therefore reduces what these figures mean for us by the trees it covers.
• What the targets count. Every tree target in this document counts trees planted and verified at planting, not trees standing years later. This is deliberate. Planting is something we can evidence permanently and check against a batch record (Section 9.2); per-tree survival a decade on is something no programme our size can verify honestly, which is why Section 9.5 stops individual monitoring after three years. A standing-count target would therefore be unverifiable by construction, and would commit us to replanting on a schedule with no end date. Survival is reported separately, as a measured rate rather than a target, and the absorption figures above already carry the 20% discount — so a planted target of 10,000,000 is projected against roughly 8,000,000 surviving trees, not 10,000,000.

13.2 Verification pipeline

Evidence is graded, not gated, and the grades are not added together.

Most trees will be planted by partners, and most partner trees are a share of a larger planting: twelve mangroves inside a project of half a million, a thousand saplings inside a national campaign. A share has no photograph of its own — not because the partner declines to take one, but because those trees are not distinguishable even to the people who put them in the ground. Requiring one would not raise the standard. It would make those batches unpublishable, which hides them.

So every batch carries a grade, computed from its own record:

The counter reports the grades, not a filtered total. The headline figure is trees planted — all three grades — and the split sits beside it, never on another page and never smaller. The headline says planted, because that is what it counts; the number of trees somebody independent checked is its own figure and is usually much smaller.

We considered publishing only what we could point at, and rejected it. A counter reading zero while thousands of trees are in the ground because of us is not caution, it is a different inaccuracy — and it would have hidden the grades too, since nobody reads the breakdown of a zero. The claim this project makes is not that it counts less than others. It is that every number it prints says what it rests on.

The grade is derived rather than chosen: whether a photograph is present, how precisely the location is stated, and whether a verifying partner is a different organisation from the planting one — all of which are already in the record. One input is a judgement, whether the batch is a share of a larger planting, and that one can only lower the grade, never raise it. A field a person fills in by hand should cost us the benefit of the doubt when it is wrong rather than hand it to us.

A tree whose credit has been sold stays in the count and leaves the absorption. Section 13.4 sets out when credits could be issued. When one is, the carbon it represents belongs to the buyer, and the same tonne cannot also stand behind our own claim — that is the double count every part of this design refuses.

So two numbers separate, and they separate in the direction that costs us:

• Trees planted does not move. The trees are in the ground. A counter that

dropped them would be the inaccuracy this section already rejects, in the other direction.

• Absorption we claim is computed across trees whose carbon is still ours.

A credit record names the plantings it draws on and how many trees it covers, and that number is subtracted.

The rule is written here now, while no credit exists and nothing turns on it, rather than when there is revenue on the other side of it.

Anyone can audit any batch from the dashboard down to its on-chain record and the evidence files themselves.

13.3 The "carbon-negative Solana" benchmark

Two facts have to be stated before this milestone means anything.

Solana already offsets its own footprint. The Solana Foundation reports the network's emissions and purchases offsets against them — 10,901 tonnes of carbon credits for the 2022 footprint, bought entirely on-chain via ecoToken and Sunrise Stake. The network is not un-offset, and we are not claiming to rescue it from anything.

The figure we measure against, and where it comes from. Measured — as of 4 September 2024. The Foundation's most recent Energy Impact Report projects network energy use of 8,755 MWh per year and gives an estimated footprint of 2,671 tCO₂ for 2024⁸. That report does not publish the carbon intensity behind the estimate, so the step from its own energy figure to its own tonnage cannot be checked from outside; the intensity it implies is 305 g CO₂/kWh, stated nowhere.

The Foundation's December 2023 Energy Use Report publishes both halves of that step: 10,830.50 MWh of energy and 4,392.9 tCO₂e of gross emissions over the same six months — annualised, 21,661 MWh and 8,785.8 tCO₂e⁹. Those two published figures imply a carbon intensity of 406 g CO₂/kWh, with no assumption of ours in it. Applied to the 2024 energy projection, that gives a gross footprint of roughly 3,551 tCO₂ per year.

We cannot reconcile the two. So the benchmark takes whichever is higher: the Foundation's most recently published figure, or our derivation from its most recently published energy figure. Today that is 3,551 tCO₂. The rule matters more than the number — it cannot be moved downward by our own arithmetic, and if the Foundation publishes a figure above our derivation the benchmark rises to theirs. Applied to December 2023 it would have returned 8,786 tCO₂, which is exactly what this document used then.

The Foundation's previous figure, from the December 2023 Energy Use Report, was 4,392.9 tCO₂ over six months — roughly 8,786 tCO₂ annualised. The benchmark tracks whichever figure the Foundation has published most recently; it has fallen, and it may rise again as network usage grows. Both are stated so a reader can see which number a claim of ours was measured against, and when.

Why gross and not net. The Foundation presents the network as carbon neutral once its purchased credits are counted. We do not measure against that. Our entire claim is that directly verifiable removal is worth more than purchased credits (Section 2.1); measuring ourselves against a baseline that already has purchased credits subtracted from it would let us claim credit for exactly the instrument we are arguing is weaker. The harder number is the honest one.

So the milestone is narrower and more honest than "making Solana carbon neutral", which the Foundation has already done by purchasing credits:

Sapling Network's Phase 2 milestone is met when the current-year, mortality-discounted absorption of our verified trees exceeds the higher of the Solana Foundation's most recently published annual network emissions figure and our own gross derivation from its most recently published energy figure — that is, when the ecosystem is carbon-negative on the strength of directly verifiable removal, in addition to the offsets the Foundation already buys.

The distinction we are drawing is about the quality of the instrument, not the arithmetic. Purchased credits are answerable to the integrity problems described in Section 2.1 — the same market that issued millions of credits from projects its own accredited auditors had signed off on. A planting we funded — the partner named, the invoice paid, the site photographed and geolocated, the record anchored on-chain — is answerable to anyone who wants to check it. That difference is the point. We are one contributor of verifiable removal alongside the Foundation's offsetting; we do not claim to replace it.

Trees whose credit has been sold do not count towards it. The benchmark is defined on the absorption of trees whose carbon is still ours (13.2), so a tonne sold as a credit is the buyer's and cannot also close this gap. Selling credits therefore moves the milestone further away for the trees involved, and that is the honest price of the revenue rather than an oversight in the rule.

At 3,551 tCO₂, 22 kg per mature tree and a 20% mortality discount, the benchmark implies roughly 202,000 trees planted — about 161,000 of them surviving once the discount is applied. That is fewer than the 250,000 Phase 2 target in the table above, where the same arithmetic gave 500,000 against the older, higher figure. The target has not moved; the baseline came down.

This does not mean Phase 2 achieves the milestone in 2029, and we want to be exact about why. The 22 kg rate is absorption at maturity, and a sapling takes roughly ten years to get there (13.1). The benchmark is defined on current-year absorption, deliberately, because current-year is the only version of the claim that is true when it is made. So Phase 2 reaches the required number of planted trees around 2029, and the absorption those trees represent arrives over the decade that follows as they mature. The roadmap therefore continues to place the milestone in the 2030+ phase. We will claim it when the measured current-year figure supports it and not before — and if the Foundation's published figure rises again, the bar rises with it.

Existing on-chain offsetting is a competitor and a proof of demand. Sunrise Stake and ecoToken already serve this market, and the Solana Foundation is their customer. That is a harder competitive position than having the field to ourselves, and also the clearest available evidence that on-chain climate funding is something the ecosystem actually buys.

13.4 What we do not claim

We do not claim to offset Bitcoin, the whole crypto industry, or emissions we cannot measure. We do not sell or double-count carbon credits. A tree funded through a Sapling Network certificate is retired to our public ledger and is not resold into a voluntary carbon market: the buyer funded that tree, and its carbon is not ours to sell a second time.

There is a plainer reason as well, and it holds whoever funded the tree. We do not measure carbon. The 22 kg figure in 13.1 carries the label assumed, which Appendix A defines as a number we have not measured and intend to replace with our own field data. A credit is a claim to a specific tonnage. Issuing one would mean certifying a figure this document tells every reader is an assumption — the practice Section 2.1 exists to object to. What we can evidence is that a tree was planted: the partner named, the invoice paid, the site published, the record anchored. That is the thing we sell, and it is the honest half of the pair. This is a promise about the trees you have paid for, not a prediction about the project's whole future. If a claim cannot be verified from our public data, we will not make it.

Where this is going, stated as an intention rather than a promise. Issuing credits is something we expect to do, and the reason we do not today is sequence rather than principle. Section 2.1 objects to credits nobody could check, not to measurement — and measurement is the half of certification that costs the most, because it is what independent verifiers are paid to establish. The credits that section describes claim an avoided event; the credits we would issue claim standing trees, which is the half of the market it separates out as checkable. Partner named, invoice paid, site published, evidence hashed, record anchored: we build that for every batch already, and it does not become available to us later, it is available now.

Four conditions have to hold first, and none of them is close:

• Our own plantings. A credit requires additionality — proof the trees would not have gone in anyway. Funding a partner who plants regardless does not establish it, which is why any credits would come from separately funded plantings that were never sold as certificates.
• Measured absorption. The 22 kg above stops being assumed only after species-specific sampling across several seasons on our own sites.
• Scale. Certification does not pay below roughly 1,000 tonnes a year, which is around 57,000 mature trees — between Phase 1 and Phase 2 on the table above.
• Maturity. These are absorption-at-maturity figures. A forest planted in 2029 supports that tonnage roughly a decade later, not on the day it is planted.

So this is a 2030s question, and we are writing it down now so that it is a direction rather than a surprise. No revenue line, phase target or price in this document assumes it happens. Until every condition above is met and this section is rewritten to say so, we sell verified plantings and nothing else.

14. Roadmap

Funding a planting and planting it are dated separately here, for the same reason Section 9.2 keeps them apart in the record. Saplings go into the ground between November and March. A quarter in which we fund trees is not the quarter in which they are planted, and this roadmap no longer writes it as though it were.

Q3 2026 — Foundation (done)

• Token v2 migration completed: fixed supply, revoked authorities, v1 fully burned ✅
• Website & whitepaper v2 release ✅
• Transparency: published records with per-batch evidence grades and on-chain anchors ✅
• Solscan token profile submitted ✅
• Official channels: X and Discord live ✅; Telegram not open yet (Section 20)
• First funded batch anchored on mainnet: 12 trees, recorded as a sponsorship

under 9.2 until its planting is evidenced ✅

Q4 2026 – Q1 2027 — First Grove funded and in the ground (in progress)

• Sapling Network app closed beta on Google Play: Android, on devnet, 25 testers,

rewards gated by a one-time identity check

• Legal entity in the EU (Estonia): registration
• First Grove funded — the first 1,000 trees paid for, each recorded as a

sponsorship under 9.2 until its planting is evidenced. Funding moves with the planting season rather than ahead of it: a tree paid for in September goes into the ground in November either way

• 1,000 trees planted across the November–March season
• Each batch evidenced, graded (13.2) and anchored; certificates minted to the

buyers who funded them

• Survival reporting begins its three-year window (9.5)
• Launchpad / exchange applications

TGE — gated on the legal entity, and we are not printing a date for it

Section 16 requires a legal entity to hold the treasury and act as counterparty before the token sale. That entity is not registered yet.

Until the entity is registered, any quarter we printed for TGE would be a date we knew we might not control, so this roadmap prints none. The project does not wait on it: planting, evidence, records, on-chain anchors and the verification pipeline all run without a token sale, and none of the milestones above or below depend on TGE having happened.

What ships with TGE, once it is possible:

• Token sale & TGE
• Liquidity pool launch (locked) + Jupiter verification
• Locked staking live (audited infrastructure)
• Multisig treasury structure finalized (6.5)

H1 2027 — Product

• Sapling Network app public release on Google Play (Section 11), with the impact profile;

staking and Round-Up follow TGE

• Plant-to-Earn live with restor.eco verification and cNFT certificates
• 25,000 trees milestone
• CoinGecko / CoinMarketCap listings

H2 2027 – 2029 — Scale

• Community governance & first Senior Member elections
• Own Anchor staking program (audited)
• First Sapling Network-operated planting sites (hybrid model)
• 250,000 trees — past the carbon-negative benchmark's planted-tree count (Section 13.3; the absorption follows as they mature)

2030+ — Ecosystem

• Sapling Network DEX: swap aggregation where every trade funds trees ("every swap plants a leaf")
• Corporate planting partnerships — verified planting with published evidence, sold as sustainability spend (8.5), not as offsets
• The carbon-negative Solana milestone — claimed when measured current-year absorption exceeds the Foundation's then-current published figure (Section 13.3)
• 10,000,000 trees by 2036

15. Team

Sapling Network is built by a named, contactable team. We are not an anonymous project, we do not use pseudonyms, and we describe each person by the work they actually do.

Efe Kaan Açıkyıldız — Founder. Efe minted the first SAPN token in September 2021 and has held the project's wallet ever since — the same key that signed the 2021 mint signed the 2026 migration and burn, which anyone can verify on-chain. That five-year continuity is the project's oldest and hardest-to-fake credential. He leads product direction, token design, and protocol architecture, selects and vets the project's reforestation partners, and is the signer of record for the project's on-chain operations.

Furkan Koçhan — Community and Design. Furkan runs the project's community and social channels and produces its visual work. He is a contributor rather than a founder: he holds no equity in the project or in the legal entity being established, holds no officer position, and does not sign for the project or its treasury. He is named here because the work is his and should be credited.

Identity and accountability. The founder is KYC-verified with exchange and launchpad compliance teams on request, and a full professional profile is provided directly to those teams as part of any listing review. The founding team's real names appear on this document, on the website, and on official channels — if Sapling Network fails to deliver what it promises here, there is a person to hold responsible, by name.

Advisors and contributors. Sapling Network is deliberately small at this stage; we would rather ship a verified forest with a handful of people than publish an advisory board that has never met. Contributors are named with the work they actually do. Advisors are announced only once they are engaged, with their role and remit disclosed.

16. Legal, Compliance & Regulatory Position

Token classification. SAPN is designed and offered as a utility token. It grants access to functions inside the Sapling Network ecosystem — purchasing verified plantings, staking, governance participation, and fee benefits. It does not represent equity, shares, debt, a profit-sharing right, or any claim on the assets or revenues of the founding team or any associated entity. Staking rewards are distributed from a pre-defined, hard-capped emission pool (Section 6.2), not from the efforts or profits of a third party, and are published as variable caps rather than promised returns.

Corporate structure. A dedicated legal entity will be established to hold the project's treasury, contract with reforestation partners, and act as the counterparty for any exchange or launchpad agreement, prior to the token sale. Entity name, jurisdiction of incorporation, and registration number will be published in this section and on the website once registration completes. Until that point the project operates as a named founder team, and this whitepaper says so plainly rather than implying a corporate wrapper that does not yet exist.

Restricted jurisdictions. The token sale and staking products are not offered to residents of jurisdictions where such offerings are restricted or require registration the project does not hold — including, without limitation, the United States (to US Persons as defined under Regulation S), and any jurisdiction subject to comprehensive international sanctions. Participants in the sale complete KYC/AML screening through the sale venue, and sanctioned-address screening is applied to sale participation.

AML/CFT. Sale proceeds are received into identified, screened accounts and wallets. Reforestation partners are paid against invoices and certificates, and every treasury outflow is published on the transparency dashboard. The project does not accept anonymous large contributions and does not operate any mixing, privacy-routing, or obfuscation mechanism.

Environmental claims. Carbon figures in this whitepaper are stated as estimates with their methodology, assumptions, and discount factors disclosed in Section 13. Sapling Network does not issue carbon credits, does not sell regulatory offsets, and does not claim compliance with any carbon-credit standard. What we sell is a verified planting with an evidence chain — described accurately, and never as a compliance-grade offset instrument.

Section 13.4 sets out the conditions under which that could change, and states issuing credits as an intention for the 2030s rather than a promise: our own plantings, absorption measured rather than assumed, enough scale to pay for certification, and a forest old enough to hold the tonnage. Until all four are met and 13.4 is rewritten to say so, we sell verified plantings and nothing else. No revenue line in this paper depends on it happening.

Data protection. Personal data collected during KYC is handled by the sale venue under its own policies. Sapling Network stores the minimum necessary and does not sell or share member data.

17. Security, Audits & Key Management

Token contract. SAPN uses the standard, battle-tested SPL Token program — not a custom token contract. There is no transfer tax, no blacklist, no rebase, no proxy, and no upgradeable logic that could alter token behaviour after launch. Mint and freeze authority are permanently revoked (Section 5.1). The most common token-level exploits are therefore not mitigated but structurally absent.

Staking infrastructure. The first generation of staking (from TGE) runs on established, independently audited third-party infrastructure rather than custom code. Writing an unaudited staking program to hold community funds at launch would be the single riskiest thing a project of our size could do, and we are not doing it. The project's own Anchor staking program (roadmapped for 2028) ships only after an independent audit by a recognised firm, with the report published in full — including unresolved findings — before the program holds any user funds.

Vesting and locks. Team vesting, sale vesting and the emission schedule are enforced by audited on-chain contracts. We use established Solana vesting infrastructure (Streamflow or Jupiter Lock) rather than writing our own: 0% of team or advisor supply is liquid at TGE, the 12-month cliff and 36-month linear release are set at deployment, and neither the founder nor a multisig can accelerate them afterwards. The initial liquidity position is locked at listing. Every lock produces a public proof link that anyone can check against this document. These are verifiable states, not commitments in a document — and once deployed the parameters cannot be revised, which is why they are being finalised before deployment.

Key management. Custody moves in two steps.

Now: the supply moves out of a single key into a Squads 2-of-3 multisig with the founder holding two keys. This does not stop the founder acting alone, and at this stage it is not meant to — nothing has been distributed, so there is no one whose funds are at risk from the founder. It removes the risk that is real today: one lost or compromised key ending the project outright.

Before TGE: custody moves to the distributed structure in Section 6.5 — 2-of-3 and 3-of-5 across separate key holders — so that no single person can move treasury funds. That is the point at which the commitment becomes both true and necessary, because it is the point at which other people's money is involved. Key-holder composition is disclosed by role at that time.

Key storage. Today the multisig's member keys are key files on separate machines — not hardware wallets. Before TGE, which is when other people's money enters the picture, every signing key moves to a hardware wallet and the wallets are kept in separate physical locations.

Source code and audits. Contract addresses, deployed program IDs, vesting contract addresses, and audit reports are published in a public repository linked from the website as each component goes live. Where a component is third-party infrastructure, we link the vendor's audit rather than claim it as our own.

Incident policy. Any security incident affecting user funds or project treasury is disclosed on official channels within 24 hours of confirmation, with a full post-mortem within 14 days. We commit to this in writing now, before there is anything to hide.

18. Risk Factors

Anyone considering participation should weigh all of the following.

Market and liquidity risk. SAPN is a small-capitalisation digital asset with no trading history. Price may be highly volatile and may fall to zero. Early liquidity will be thin, meaning large orders can move the price significantly and exiting a position may be difficult or costly.

Execution risk. The roadmap in Section 14 spans a decade and depends on funding, partnerships, hiring, and technology that are not yet in place. Milestones may be delayed, reduced in scope, or reordered. Our stated policy is that an under-funded phase shifts in time rather than being quietly diluted — but shifting in time is itself a real risk to participants.

Concentration risk. Until the distribution described in Section 6.5 completes, the entire supply sits in one 2-of-3 multisig in which the founder holds two keys — so in practice the founder can still move it alone. Even afterwards, the founding team's influence over treasury and governance remains substantial for years. Participants are trusting a small, named team.

Funding risk. The token sale targets $50,000 — a deliberately modest figure that funds the first phases, not the whole vision. Later phases depend on revenue streams (the corporate planting line in particular) that are planned but unproven. Closing the door on credits in 13.4 leaves that dependency resting on whether buyers pay for evidence, which is the risk named at the end of this section rather than one hidden behind a carbon-credit line we could not honestly run. If those streams do not materialise, later tree targets are not reachable on the stated timeline.

Stewardship funding risk. Planting creates an obligation that outlives the emission schedule: sites must be monitored after the planting margin that funds monitoring has slowed. Section 9.6 sets out the ring-fenced reserve and its limits — beyond roughly year ten, stewardship depends on recurring revenue rather than planting margin. If that revenue does not materialise, the scope of stewardship narrows to site-level reporting.

Partner and verification risk. Trees are planted by third-party reforestation partners. Partners may underperform, misreport, or fail. Sapling mortality is real, and our 20% discount factor is an estimate that may prove optimistic in a given region or season. Verification reduces this risk; it does not eliminate it.

Narrative risk — the crypto footprint is shrinking. Our first application is the crypto industry's own emissions, and that problem is getting smaller: Ethereum's move to Proof of Stake removed over 99.9% of its footprint, efficient chains keep gaining share, and the Solana Foundation already offsets its network's emissions. A project positioned solely as "cleaning up crypto" would face a shrinking purpose. We have deliberately positioned around verifiable reforestation instead, which is not crypto-specific — but a reader should weigh how much of our early revenue nonetheless depends on crypto-sector demand.

Competition. Corporate tree planting is an established market with well-funded incumbents selling verified planting from roughly $0.43 per tree¹², and on-chain offsetting on Solana is already served by Sunrise Stake and ecoToken. We do not compete on price and do not expect to. If buyers do not value the durability of on-chain, vendor-independent proof enough to pay a premium for it, our B2B thesis does not hold.

Regulatory risk. Digital-asset regulation is evolving in every jurisdiction relevant to this project, including Türkiye and the EU. Future rules may restrict the sale, staking products, or the token's utility, may require restructuring, or may make some functions unavailable in some jurisdictions. Environmental-claims regulation may also tighten the language we are permitted to use.

Exchange and listing risk. Listing applications may be rejected, may carry costs the project cannot meet, or may impose terms the team judges to be against participants' interests. No listing on any specific venue is guaranteed, and this whitepaper does not promise one.

Technology risk. Solana network outages, third-party staking infrastructure failures, wallet compromises, or bugs in software the project depends on could affect availability of funds or rewards.

The legal entity does not exist yet. Section 16 requires one before the token sale, and it is not registered. The consequence is direct: this document prints no date for TGE, and Section 14 says so rather than naming a quarter it might not hold. Everything that does not require an entity — planting, evidence, records, anchors, certificates — continues meanwhile, but a participant should read the sale in Section 7 as conditional on a step that has not been taken.

Key-person risk. Sapling Network currently depends on a single founder, supported by a small contributor team. The loss of that person would halt execution outright. This is a sharper concentration than most projects at this stage carry, and it does not ease until the founding team and the legal entity are both in place.

No guaranteed returns. All APY figures in this document are caps calculated from a fixed emission pool. They decline as staking participation grows and as emission decays. They are not, and must not be read as, promised or guaranteed yield.

Rewards are paid in SAPN. Staking and tree yield are denominated in SAPN, so their value in any other currency moves with the token price: a nominal yield can coincide with a loss in dollar terms if the price falls. Tree yield is partly insulated — the cap is a percentage of the SAPN actually paid for the tree, so the rate is unaffected by price — but the value of the tokens received is not.

19. Vision & Mission

Vision: A blockchain economy where financial innovation and planetary responsibility are the same motion — and a Solana ecosystem that removes more carbon than it emits.

Mission: To reduce and reverse the environmental impact of blockchain technology by uniting an energy-efficient settlement layer, verifiable reforestation, and transparent economics in a single ecosystem.

20. Official Channels

Sapling Network communicates through a short, fixed list of channels. Anything not on this list is not us.

Telegram is not open yet. When it is, it appears in this table first — an invitation you did not find here is not ours.

Anti-scam commitments — permanent, no exceptions:

• The only valid SAPN contract address is the one above. Any other "SAPN" is not ours, regardless of name or logo.
• We will never DM you first, never ask for your seed phrase or private key, and never ask you to "verify", "sync", "migrate", or "unlock" a wallet.
• We will never run a surprise airdrop, giveaway, or "presale extension" that requires you to send funds to a wallet.
• The token sale happens at exactly one announced venue, announced in advance on every official channel simultaneously. If you see a sale you did not read about on this list first, it is fraud.
• Support never happens in private messages initiated by us.

Appendix A. Symbol Reference

Six formulas appear in this document, in Sections 6.2, 8.1.1, 9.3, 9.4, 10 and 10.1. Every term in them is listed here in one place, together with the published bounds that are not themselves formulas, with each one's unit, its value today where it has one, and — the column that matters most — where that value comes from.

On the Status column. A number in a whitepaper is not worth much unless the reader can tell what kind of number it is. A figure we committed to, a figure we chose and may revise, a figure we read off the chain, and a figure we estimated are four different things, and treating them alike is how documents quietly become wrong. So each is labelled:

• covenant — published and fixed. Changing it would change what was promised.
• parameter — published and adjustable under a stated rule, with notice.
• measured — read from the world or the chain. Carries a date and a source.
• assumed — an estimate we have not measured yet. Replaced when we can measure it.
• computed — derived from the rows above. Never written by hand.

The values in the Value today column are generated from the same model that produces the figures in Sections 6 through 10, not transcribed by hand, so the table cannot drift away from the text. Where a symbol is a free variable it shows —.

Appendix B. Sources

Every third-party figure in this document is listed here with the source it came from. Superscript numbers in the text link straight to it. Figures produced by our own model — prices, emission, allocations, the absorption arithmetic — are not third-party claims and are defined in Appendix A instead.

1. The Guardian, Die Zeit and SourceMaterial, joint investigation into Verra's rainforest

offsets, 18 January 2023. theguardian.com

1. Verra, suspension of the validation and verification bodies involved in the 37 rejected

rice-cultivation projects in China, 25 March 2025 — the rejection itself was late 2024. verra.org

1. Ethereum Foundation, energy consumption after the move to Proof of Stake. The

Foundation's own figure is ~99.95%; we state the more conservative "over 99.9%". blog.ethereum.org

1. Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance, Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index,

methodology and live estimate. ccaf.io

1. ESMA, Final Report on MiCA technical standards, second package, 3 July 2024 — the

sustainability indicators and the threshold at which the supplementary set applies. esma.europa.eu

1. Paul Hastings, client alert on MiCA white-paper requirements and the 23 December 2025

date. paulhastings.com

1. Per-tree absorption. The widely quoted 22 kg figure is usually attributed to a European

Environment Agency page that is no longer online — the URL now returns 410 Gone. We could not verify it at source, which is why Section 13.1 carries it as assumed, with the 10–40 kg range stated, rather than as a measurement. For the range and the reasoning: onetreeplanted.org

1. Solana Foundation, Energy Impact Report, snapshot 4 September 2024 — 8,755 MWh projected

and 2,671 tCO₂ estimated. solana.com

1. Solana Foundation, Energy Use Report, December 2023 — 658 J per transaction, 10,830.50 MWh

and 4,392.9 tCO₂e over six months, and the 10,901.2 tonnes of credits bought against the 2022 footprint. This is the report the carbon intensity in Section 13.3 is derived from. solana.com

1. Eden: People+Planet, corporate partnerships — "landscape partnerships begin at $50,000

annually". eden-plus.org

1. Scientific American, on reforestation costs, February 2024 — Eden planting at 10–20 cents

per tree. Eden itself no longer publishes a per-tree price; the ~333,000 trees figure in Section 8.1 is our own division of $50,000 by the midpoint of that range. scientificamerican.com

1. GoodAPI, corporate tree planting — verified reforestation from $0.43 per tree, backed by

the Arbor Day Foundation and Veritree. thegoodapi.com

All twelve were checked and resolving on 31 August 2026. Where a source later disappears — as number 7 already has — this appendix says so rather than leaving a number without a footing.

21. Disclaimer

SAPN is a utility token intended for use within the Sapling Network ecosystem. It does not represent equity, debt, or any claim on the Sapling Network team, and nothing in this document constitutes investment, legal, or tax advice. Staking rates are variable, capped estimates — not guaranteed returns. Digital assets are volatile and may result in total loss; participants are responsible for compliance with the laws of their own jurisdiction. Participation carries the risks set out in Section 18, which should be read in full. Forward-looking statements (including the roadmap and impact targets) reflect current plans and honest estimates, and may change as the project evolves; material changes will be announced on official channels.