The Rainforest Alliance is coming to Cardano: a milestone for real-world adoption 
For the past 10 months, we’ve been closely working at STORM Partners with the Rainforest Alliance team, to explore how Cardano could power one of the most ambitious sustainability pilots in the ecosystem so far. After almost a year of onboarding, educating, and advocating for Cardano, that work is now finally public: The Rainforest Alliance is officially listed as a Fund 14 Catalyst proposer, looking to bring transparent product traceability into global supply chains.
Why this matters
The Rainforest Alliance isn’t a small partner, they’re one of the biggest and most trusted international NGOs globally. They collaborate with 7.9M farmers and workers across 62 countries, steward more than 6M hectares of farmland, and their frog seal appears on over 40,000 products in 155 countries. Their certified supply chains account for 51% of the world’s cocoa and 17% of global coffee. Few organizations are better positioned to showcase how Cardano can deliver blockchain for good at scale.
What they plan to build on Cardano 
The proposal centers on a traceability MVP, including:
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Product submission-to-trace workflow for community forestry enterprises (CFEs)
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Blockchain-anchored QR smart labels
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A dashboard for approvals and monitoring
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A demo tool so buyers can query provenance and place inquiries
CFEs are community-run forestry businesses that manage and sell products sustainably but often struggle to reach international markets. By anchoring their data on Cardano, their products gain trusted provenance, which helps them capture more value and access new buyers. Importantly, the scope includes 400k ADA invested directly into field operations, ensuring real adoption beyond just technical development.
The Rainforest Alliance will also test proven Cardano-native tools like Originate and ScanTrust, which have already delivered traceability in other traceability use cases. This combination of field deployment and blockchain integration is designed to be practical from day one, while laying a foundation to expand into wider markets.
The snowball effect 
The Rainforest Alliance already works with major global brands across coffee, cocoa, tea, and forestry supply chains, including companies like Nestlé, Mars, and Unilever. These brands rely on their certification to maintain consumer trust and access markets.
A functional Cardano-based traceability system would not only prove value for CFEs, it would also create a ready-made blueprint for these corporations to integrate blockchain-backed transparency into their existing supply chains. Once one major buyer adopts, others will follow, creating a cascade that could put Cardano at the heart of how sustainability claims are verified in global commodities.
This is how a targeted pilot can unlock enterprise adoption at scale: start small, validate in the field, and then expand into entire industries.
Alignment with Cardano values 
Cardano has always emphasized sustainability, transparency, and inclusivity. Partnering with the Rainforest Alliance is a direct expression of those values, showing that blockchain can deliver measurable, positive impact rather than just promises. Over the past year, we at STORM Partners have worked alongside The Rainforest Alliance and Modus Create to scope and align this initiative, helping connect the dots between their sustainability expertise and Cardano’s technology. The result is a pilot that takes Cardano’s mission and turns it into adoption communities, enterprises, and consumers can actually experience.
Learn more and support 
The Rainforest Alliance pilot is not an isolated initiative. Alongside it, we have other enterprise-focused proposals aimed at bringing more organizations of this caliber into Cardano and supporting those already building through Catalyst. If you want to dive deeper, you’ll find the Rainforest Alliance initiative in full detail as well as our other enterprise-related proposals here: STORM Partners Proposer Page. Supporting these proposals is the most direct way to help us bring credible, large-scale adoption stories to Cardano.
As a registered DRep, STORM Partners represents this same commitment inside Cardano governance: a focus on measurable impact, long-term alignment, and bridging grassroots innovation with enterprise and institutional adoption. By voting for our proposals or delegating to us as a dRep, you are backing an approach designed to position Cardano as the trusted infrastructure for real-world systems. If that vision resonates with you, we welcome your support: dRep profile.