Cardano Foundation and Petrobras, Brazil's state-controlled oil giant, are taking their partnership to a new stage with two blockchain applications targeting sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) and renewable Diesel R. What began as a corporate education program has evolved into a considerably more ambitious effort: placing fuel supply chains on-chain to fight greenwashing and improve traceability across Brazil's energy sector. For fuels whose environmental value depends on how they were made, verifiable origin data is what separates a marketing claim from an auditable record.

From Classroom to Supply Chain

The Cardano-Petrobras relationship started in December 2023, when Cardano Academy launched a blockchain education initiative for Petrobras' workforce of roughly 40,000 employees. The first 500 participants received evolving NFTs as credentials.

By 2025, Cardano Foundation had formalized a collaboration with PUC-Rio, one of Brazil's leading research universities, to develop real-world blockchain applications for the renewable fuel sector, with SAF as the primary focus.

The move into applications comes as Brazil builds regulated demand for these fuels: the country's 2024 "Fuel of the Future" law introduced a phased SAF blending requirement for the aviation fuel supply. Petrobras began its first commercial deliveries of domestically produced SAF in December 2025, starting with an initial batch of 3,000 cubic meters. The company aims to meet 100% of Brazil's domestic SAF demand through co-processing by 2027 to 2029 — a refining approach in which renewable feedstocks are processed alongside petroleum in existing refinery units.

SAF is jet fuel produced from non-petroleum sources such as agricultural waste, used cooking oil, or other biomass. Renewable Diesel R is a renewable diesel product, a fuel category that is likewise produced from non-petroleum feedstocks and designed for use in existing diesel engines. Because both derive their climate benefit from feedstock origin and processing pathway, supply chain documentation is central to certifying these fuels — precisely the problem tokenization is meant to address.

What the Applications Do

The first application focuses on tokenizing the SAF supply chain, creating verifiable, immutable records of where the fuel came from, how it was processed, and how it moved through the logistics network. Records of this kind give producers, regulators, and buyers a shared ledger to audit against when verifying that a "sustainable" fuel is what it claims to be.

The second application is a decentralized app, or dApp, designed to reward airline passengers who fly on SAF-powered routes. As of November 2025, the project had advanced to active development, with incentive mechanics being built to encourage consumer participation in sustainable fuel adoption. Its path from development to deployment, alongside Petrobras' co-processing ramp toward the 2027-2029 target, will be among the milestones showing whether the initiative moves from pilot to production.

Alongside these, the partnership has developed what it calls a Proof of Atenas system, an attendance and training verification tool that uses NFC cards and 3D-printed physical totems to record employee participation in immutable on-chain logs. A pilot ran in 2024, and expanded internal implementation has been under discussion through 2026 — another marker of whether the education-to-operations pipeline keeps widening.

A Landmark Partnership for Cardano in the Region

Cardano Foundation describes the Petrobras collaboration as its first governmental partnership in Latin America. Because Petrobras is majority state-owned, the project effectively amounts to a blockchain initiative with Brazilian government involvement — and with Petrobras occupying a central role in the country's fuel production and logistics, the traceability tooling being tested here touches a sizable share of Brazil's energy supply chain.