Rob Holmes of Suno
In conversation with Rob Holmes of Suno on funding the solar energy transition.
By CARBON Copy Team | February 18th, 2026
Suno believes that a financial ecosystem built around clean energy is one of the most scalable ways to address climate change. Its solution uses blockchain infrastructure and a two-token system to channel global capital efficiently into renewable infrastructure — while offering yield, liquidity, and accessibility for users.
To better understand the solar energy transition in the context of Web3 and ReFi, we sat down with Suno's BD & Growth Lead, Rob Holmes.
CARBON Copy: We really appreciate you taking the time to chat with us. We hope 2026 has been good to you so far.
Rob: Thanks for having us - really appreciate it. 2026’s already been a pretty wild year hasn’t it across global politics, traditional markets and of course across Web3! You can feel the shift happening, less hype, more focus on real usage, real yield, real economic activity. A lot of ecosystems are reorganising around that.
For us at Suno, it’s been a big year too. We’ve launched the Perpetual Impact Loop, we’re rolling out new DeFi-native yield products, and we’re spending a lot of time refining the financial layer around tokenised solar. It feels like the market is maturing, and we’re building right into that moment.
CC: First off, why do you think it is so difficult to attract meaningful capital to tokenised solar projects, despite the promise of yield? Is it a crypto/Web3 issue or is there something else holding things back?
Rob: It’s difficult because tokenised solar sits between two very demanding capital markets, infrastructure and crypto, and both require more than just yield.
On the infrastructure side, solar projects are operationally complex to get off the ground. You need real origination, EPC execution, bankable offtakers, and legally clean SPV structures. Without a strong pipeline and institutional-grade structuring, scale stalls quickly, and many tokenised solar platforms struggle with project pipeline quality and the formation of a vertically integrated pipeline.
One of Suno’s key advantages is that it was incubated inside Unergy (Colombia’s largest mid-scale developer) with a $200M+ project pipeline and real EPC capability provided by local partners. That removes a massive execution risk that many Web3-first projects underestimate.
On the crypto side, investors expect liquidity, composability, and minimal friction. Many tokenised solar models issue one token per project, which fragments liquidity and creates thin secondary markets. That limits capital confidence.
There’s also the broader RWA cold-start problem: institutions want regulatory clarity, track record, and liquidity depth before allocating serious capital, but liquidity depth only emerges once serious capital is already there.
What we believe is missing is infrastructure around the asset, not the asset itself. Our approach to this has been to tokenise projects, aggregate them, create a reserve layer, and make that layer liquid. That’s the logic behind why we separated project-level tokens (pWatt), and launched a reserve-level liquid token backed by diversified operational solar projects (uWatt).
Moving forwards we’re also focussing on more DeFi native level integrations, we’ll shortly move toward an ERC-4626 vault structure with an auto-compounding yield mechanism that reduces investor effort and makes exposure more “plug-and-play.” We also have a blended yield vault on our roadmap, combining solar yield with lower-volatility assets like existing tokenised treasury bills where deeper liquidity exists, which we believe will serve as an initial on-ramp for institutional capital to explore investments into tokenised solar assets.
The future of tokenised solar isn’t just about putting panels on-chain. It’s about building the financial architecture around them so capital can move confidently and at scale.
CC: We’ve seen quite a few ReFi investment instruments, specifically aimed at revenue-generating solar projects, launch in the past year or two. The concept seems like a no-brainer to us, but we acknowledge that much of the crypto world wants 100x, not steady returns. Are you still bullish on investment instruments as a means to attract capital?
Rob: Yes - and more than ever. All evidence points towards the “100x” cycle maturing. Look, there’s always going to be a part of crypto that chases 100x. That’s part of its DNA - even if it is shrinking. But what’s interesting is that when you sit down with L1 and L2 ecosystem teams today, the conversation has shifted. It’s less about hype cycles and more about durable on-chain activity. Ecosystem teams are under pressure to justify real economic throughput. They’re being measured on transaction quality, stablecoin flows, enterprise integrations, and repeatable usage, not just speculative token price action.
Tokenised solar isn’t designed to compete with meme coins for attention. It’s designed to anchor capital. And interestingly, the more mature the market becomes, the more relevant that becomes.
If someone’s primary objective is 100x in six months, tokenised solar probably isn’t for them. But if the industry is serious about attracting institutional capital, about becoming a real financial layer - which current ecosystem team reorgs point towards - then yield-bearing, asset-backed instruments are essential.
What we’re building now goes beyond simple tokenisation. We’re moving toward vault structures, auto-compounding yield mechanisms, and blended risk profiles that make these instruments easier to hold and integrate into DeFi. That’s the bridge between real-world yield and crypto-native capital.
CC: Switching gears a bit. You recently launched the Perpetual Impact Loop. Could you tell us a little bit more about it?
Rob: The Perpetual Impact Loop extends the investment model into capital for funding the clean energy transition in emerging markets that never exits and perpetually compounds with time.
Instead of capital going into tokenised solar, producing yield, and being withdrawn, it becomes capital going into tokenised solar, producing yield, being automatically reinvested into more solar assets, and compounding impact on repeat.
In Suno, typically revenues from energy sales are allocated across operating and managing the assets, investor yield, and asset depreciation coverage.
The depreciation component continuously acquires new pWatts (individual project tokens), expanding the reserve. Whilst in the Perpetual Impact Loop the proportion of revenues from energy sales that typically goes into investor yield is automatically reinvested into more solar. This means that donations don’t just get spent once, they become perpetual productive infrastructure, and yield compounds into new solar capacity well into the future.
It’s effectively a regenerative capital engine for those of us who see capital not just as a tool for personal return, but as a lever to accelerate the energy transition and leave something materially better behind.
CC: We’re curious about the choice of donations as the capital formation mechanism. Could you provide us with some background on that decision?
Rob: Well we made the decision for one main reason really. Some capital doesn’t require financial return. Impact foundations and climate-aligned capital often want verified impact, transparent reporting, and long-term sustainability. Tokenised infrastructure makes impact measurable and auditable on-chain. Philanthropy is an opaque $2T+ market. There is no transparent mechanism for measuring the outcomes delivered by NGOs and their impactful initiatives that have been funded by donations, and when these organisations run out of funds they have to come back and ask for more donations.
With Suno’s Perpetual Impact Loop, over 30 years a single $1 donation becomes $50 without that individual ever needing to donate again.
And with forthcoming transparency work related to our Clean-Energy Impact Oracle, we’re taking this a step further. We are building an open Energy Attestation Service using the Ethereum Attestation Service (EAS) to record verified kWh production from our solar projects directly on-chain. That means every unit of energy generated can be independently verified, timestamped, and auditable across ecosystems like Polygon and Celo.
So instead of donating into a black box, contributors can see exactly how much clean energy has been produced, how much has been reinvested, and how that maps to SDG outcomes over time.
The goal is simple but radical: turn philanthropy from a recurring ask into a regenerative, transparent infrastructure layer - where capital compounds impact, and impact is verifiable.
But to be clear, Suno began as an investment protocol. Donations came later as an expansion of the model, not the foundation.
CC: One of the primary challenges with donations (and investment instruments, for that matter) that we see is that scale is the only real way to attract meaningful capital. But scale, as we know, requires significant upfront investment. Is it a situation where we’re looking at it the wrong way or is this just how it is?
Rob: Scale in infrastructure traditionally requires massive upfront equity, debt syndication, long underwriting cycles. Tokenisation changes the capital formation geometry. Traditional infrastructure scaling looks like this, raise $50M to be deployed into 10 projects and repeat. That requires large institutional LPs, heavy underwriting, and long fundraising cycles.
Tokenised scaling can look different, you can have 4,000+ token holders contributing smaller amounts funding $6.3M across 40+ projects incrementally, with the added liquidity allowing recycling of capital like in Suno.
The difference isn’t that less capital is needed, it’s that capital can now aggregate from many smaller contributors instead of a few large gatekeepers.
CC: The other challenge we see is the fierce competition for capital, especially altruistic capital. How can ReFi, and crypto more broadly, best compete for this capital?
Rob: By being more transparent than NGOs, more accountable than carbon credits, and more productive than offsets. Tokenised solar has many advantages, verifiable MWh production, on-chain yield tracking, and SPV-backed legal structures.
Carbon markets collapsed because data integrity failed. Clean energy infrastructure doesn’t have that weakness - energy is metered, revenues are contractual, yield is measurable.
Beyond being emotionally persuasive, ReFi can also win by being economically rational.
CC: Zooming out, are there any trends we should know about with respect to funding solar projects?
Rob: There are three major trends we’re watching closely.
First, mid-scale distributed solar is accelerating across emerging markets. Projects under 5MW are driving much of the growth in LATAM because they’re faster to deploy, less dependent on transmission infrastructure, and backed by stable local offtake agreements. They solve real energy constraints quickly.
Second, the capital gap is staggering. Emerging markets need around $1.7 trillion annually by 2030 to fund the energy transition, yet less than 15% of global private capital currently flows into those regions. That mismatch creates a huge structural opportunity. We estimate the mid-scale distributed solar segment alone represents over $140 billion globally, with around 3,500 potential mini-farms in Colombia alone. The demand exists. What’s missing is capital architecture.
And third, there’s a macro shift happening in how solar is being perceived. Leaders like Elon Musk have recently argued that solar isn’t just part of the mix, it could theoretically power entire economies, especially as AI, data centres and electrification push electricity demand to unprecedented levels. The constraint being talked about on future growth isn’t computation but energy. Solar is increasingly being positioned as the backbone of that future system.
So when you combine accelerating deployment, a massive capital shortfall, and a reframing of solar as foundational infrastructure for the digital economy, you start to see why this moment feels structurally different from previous cycles.
CC: Lastly, we’ve always been curious as to why Latin America has emerged as a hotbed of tokenised solar. Can you explain it?
Rob: Because it’s structurally aligned for this model, economically, physically, and regulatorily.
You have strong solar irradiation, growing electricity demand, and thousands of mid-scale projects that are too small for banks but too large for microfinance. That’s the “missing middle” where tokenisation adds the most value.
Colombia in particular has provided an innovation-friendly regulatory environment. The lack of digital-asset framework gave us room to sandbox and structure tokenised solar assets responsibly, test on-chain yield distribution, and build real traction before moving toward more formal prospectus structures outside of Colombia.
And importantly, traditional capital markets in the region simply don’t serve these projects efficiently. That creates genuine whitespace.
So LATAM isn’t accidental. It’s a region where the need for new capital architecture is visible, and where regulations have been open enough to let that architecture be built.
CC: This has been great, thank you! What's the one takeaway you'd like to leave our readers with?
Rob: If there’s one takeaway, it’s this: tokenisation only matters if it mobilises new capital into the real economy. The first wave of RWAs proved we can digitise existing financial assets that were already largely easily accessible. The second wave has to prove we can fund productive infrastructure that otherwise wouldn’t get built or otherwise be accessible to the masses.
At Suno, we’ve already financed 40+ solar projects, deployed over $6 million into real assets, and distributed more than $1 million in verified on-chain yield. So it's no longer theoretical, it’s clean energy being generated, revenues flowing, and capital being recycled back into more infrastructure.
But what excites me most isn’t what we’ve done, it’s what this model unlocks. When you combine liquidity-first token design, DeFi-native vault architecture, auto-compounding yield, institutional on-ramps, and verifiable energy production recorded on-chain, you’re not just putting solar panels on blockchain. You’re building a new capital formation layer for the energy transition.
And the energy transition isn’t optional. As electricity demand accelerates, driven by AI, electrification, and industrial growth, the world doesn’t need more speculative yield. It needs mechanisms that can fund clean power quickly, transparently, and at scale. If Web3 wants to be taken seriously as financial infrastructure, this is the direction. Global liquidity, local power, verifiable impact. That’s the bridge we’re building.