Harvest is building a verification infrastructure that provides investors with a verified, clean version of Bitcoin — a sustainable Bitcoin protocol that attests clean energy provenance on chain. The company is now building towards a Clean Energy Bitcoin ETF designed for pensions, endowments, and climate-mandated capital. Joining me is Matthew Twomey, Co-Founder of Harvest and Head of Institutional. Welcome to the show, Matt.
Lucy, thanks so much for having me.
What problem is Harvest solving and what can institutions not do today with Bitcoin that your verification layer solves for them?
Right now, institutional capital that operates under climate mandates — pension funds, endowments, asset allocators, sovereign funds — is effectively locked out of Bitcoin. Not because they do not want exposure, but because they cannot prove what is behind it. A miner can say they are running on hydro, but that is not sufficient for a climate investment committee to sign off on when doing due diligence on a Bitcoin allocation. That is the gap we close. We collect and analyse clean energy data from our Bitcoin mining partners — meter readings, renewable energy certificates — and we turn that into an on-chain proof that can be verified right down to the exact mining facility it came from. That turns Bitcoin from something a climate investment committee cannot touch into something it can allocate to. Bitcoin is famous for running on proof of work. What we have built is proof of clean work.
You are working with about 25% of all global hashrate. What convinces miners to adopt your protocol?
It comes down to incentives. These miners were already doing the hard work — using hydro, flared or waste gas, curtailed renewables — but they had no way to prove it outside of their own internal reporting. We give them third-party verified proof. That is very important for capital coming into the sector, and it also allows them to earn additional revenue. We believe that by using the protocol and actively choosing clean energy, miners can monetise that clean energy choice. The attention on Bitcoin's mining footprint has always been in the spotlight — from the industry and from regulators globally. We feel like this is a compelling story to tell, but it needs the verification proof that we have created.
How would a Clean Energy Bitcoin ETF unlock the institutions currently sitting on the sidelines?
It is exactly what we are building for. PwC outlined in one of their more recent surveys that there is something like $15 trillion of climate capital in pension funds, endowment funds, and sovereign funds that is allocated towards climate and infrastructure investment — mandated capital that Bitcoin, from their lens, currently cannot satisfy. What we are trying to do by creating a Clean Energy Bitcoin ETF is attract this new capital. Bitcoin currently has an AUM of about $1.3 trillion. In comparison, gold is around a $20 trillion asset. We firmly believe the allocation that will take Bitcoin toward those levels will come from this climate-mandated capital. The ETF holds Bitcoin alongside the SPX token — the on-chain asset that provides verifiable proof of the clean energy behind it. That makes it not just a verified clean energy Bitcoin ETF by label, but a genuinely differentiated institutional product.
Is there a next step — clean compute verification for AI data centres?
That has been one of the big developments we have seen, especially over the last couple of years within the mining space. The evolution of what we have built — our clean energy Bitcoin verification platform — is not specific just to Bitcoin. It is a way of proving the compute for different data centres being built globally. We now believe that the ultimate evolution of what we are working on with our Bitcoin mining partners is how we verify clean compute within their data centres and create a similar product — something like a clean compute token — which allows investors who want exposure to AI infrastructure but have climate-mandated frameworks to get that exposure with full energy provenance verification. As Bitcoin miners pivot and become neo clouds, that gives us an incredible vantage point to capitalise on this opportunity.
Fantastic, Matt. Congratulations — you are based in ADGM, registered here, part of the Hub71 network. An incredible roadmap ahead. Thank you for coming on the show.
Thank you for your time.
