Never show your hand.
Molecules clears used cooking oil and other low-carbon feedstocks in sealed rounds. Nobody sees your price or your volume, us included. Everyone sees the price it clears at.
Built and operated by Thalassis (opens in a new tab)
Why Molecules, in five minutesFrom the team that built these, at Thalassis (opens in a new tab)
UNDPEnergy for Growth platform
KH MarqueISCC chain of custody
Global SAF Corp.Asia's first SAF registry
Bankwards€80M+ processed in Q1
360 Jet Fuel250+ fuel suppliers
In a thin market, whoever names a price first loses.
Your number caps you
Say it and nobody pays more than you asked, while you learn nothing about their ceiling. So everyone waits.
You only reach who you know
The buyer who would have paid most may never have heard of you, and you will never hear of them.
So the price is a phone call
Discovery happens over email, one bilateral at a time, and nobody trusts the number it produces.
A round, not a running market.
A running market needs two people wanting opposite things at the same instant. A round gathers a window of interest and settles it at once, so Tuesday trades against Thursday.
Seal your order
Your limit, your volume and your terms, encrypted in your browser before they leave. Submit whenever suits you during the window.
Clear everything at once
When the window closes, every order is matched together, to make the most of the trades available. Nobody acts first.
One price, published
Each segment publishes one clearing price and one cleared volume. Everyone who traded in it pays or receives that price.
You do not have to trust us, or them.
Two things must meet before an order can be opened: the sealed orders and the keys. Nobody holds both.
- Thalassis holds the orders, and no key.There is no screen anywhere that shows another trader's price or volume.
- The council holds the keys, and never an order.A quorum is needed, never one side of the market alone, always including a neutral seat.
- The keys only work on published code.Orders open inside a sealed environment, and only if it runs exactly the code that was published.
| Information | You | Other traders | Thalassis | The council |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Your price and volume | ||||
| Anyone else's price and volume | ||||
| What orders require | ||||
| The clearing price |
The worst thing our governance can do to you is nothing at all.
Members can refuse to sign off a round. They cannot see an order, move a price or direct an allocation, which is why seats can go to the people you compete with.
One price for everyone, by a rule set in advance.
- The middle of the band. A range of prices produces the same trades. Molecules takes its midpoint, so neither side is favoured.
- Your limit is not your price. The gap between your limit and the clearing price is yours to keep.
- Ties go to the earliest order. Committing early is rewarded, and it is auditable.
Supply loose
A seller offers 100 t at 1,000. A buyer wants 150 t at 1,200.
100 t clear at 1,100
Supply tight
A seller offers 100 t at 1,000. Two buyers want 100 t each, at 1,300 and 1,290.
100 t clear at 1,295
A requirement costs nothing until it binds.
Declaring one does not open a separate book, and better material can always fill a looser order. The market splits only when the demand that needs something cannot be met at the common price.
Enough clean oil
Some buyers need 5% free fatty acid or less, others take 15%. Low-acid supply covers the tight buyers at the common price.
One segment, one price
Not enough
Low-acid supply runs out first. The buyers who need it price up until they clear.
Two prices: the premium for clean oil, visible
The first users are the governance.
The founding council is the first cohort of traders, with a neutral third to keep it honest. A seat confers standing, not information.
- Anchor member
- KH Marque, South East Asia's largest used cooking oil collector.Seated
- Trading seats
- Members trade by default, across supply, demand and verification, so no single side sets the rules.
- Neutral seats
- A university and a certification body, asked to break the mechanism before it goes live and after.
- What it decides
- The published rules a round runs under, round length, and which molecule comes next. Not prices, and not allocations.
- What a round needs
- A quorum's signatures on the code about to run. Minutes of work, once a round.
UCO first
It goes into everything.
Used cooking oil is an input into nearly every kind of low-carbon fuel, which makes it the most universal place to start and puts the right counterparties in one room.
The auction does not care what is in the barrel. Adding renewable diesel, hydrogen, ammonia, e-fuels or biomethane is configuration, not engineering, and the council decides what comes next.
2008
Not a research project.
A sealed double auction reallocated around 25,000 tonnes of Danish sugar beet production rights in a single round, without any party seeing another's order. Auctions like it have cleared real commodity markets since.
That was a fungible commodity. Molecules makes it work for goods that do not trade like commodities yet: lumpy, shallow, and specified down to the acid content.
ThalassisBuilt by people who run registries for a living.
Thalassis builds compliance and trading platforms for energy and aviation. Registries, chain of custody, mass balance and payments are already in production, for clients who cannot afford to get them wrong.
KH Marque, South East Asia's largest UCO collector
Green Tracker: chain of custody for ISCC EU certified feedstock, signed end to end.
The same oil Molecules clears firstA state-backed petroleum company
Their internal book-and-claim registry and mass balance system. Self-hosted, RSB and ISCC compatible, with double counting ruled out by the system itself.
Live across every moduleUnited Nations Development Programme
Energy for Growth, the pipeline platform for African clean-energy finance, built for the UNDP Rome Centre and run by the Centre since handover.
Twelve-month build, GDPR-compliant360 Jet Fuel
A closed-circuit fuel payment system with live credit checks for business aviation.
250+ suppliers, 250+ tail numbers
Take a seat before the first price is set.
We are seating the founding council and running pilot rounds with named counterparties. If you buy, sell or certify used cooking oil, talk to us. Economists can ask for the mechanism note.