One registry, two names
Most people say “the IATA SAF Registry”, and the shorthand is understandable: IATA built it, announced it, and hosts it at safregistry.iata.org. The precise name is the CADO SAF Registry. It is operated by the Civil Aviation Decarbonization Organization, an independent body, and underpinned by IATA’s SAF Accounting and Reporting Methodology.
The split matters more than it sounds. A registry is the referee of the SAF market: it decides whose claim is whose. A referee owned by one side would be a weaker referee, so the operator is independent of the airlines whose fuel it records. When we write “IATA’s CADO SAF Registry”, both halves of that arrangement are in the name.
What it records
The registry records the environmental attributes of SAF batches: the certified reduction, the pathway and the chain of evidence behind each one. Attributes are transferred between account holders and retired to a single named owner, once, at which point the claim becomes usable and nobody else can ever make it. The registry lesson covers that machinery in detail, and it works the same way here as on any credible registry.
What makes this registry different is reach. It was built for a global market: airlines, fuel suppliers and corporate buyers on one system. A batch uplifted in one country can then support a claim held in another, without the evidence chain breaking.
What settled there first
We delivered the first transaction on IATA’s CADO SAF Registry: SAF Scope 3 certificates supplied to Microsoft, derived from Cathay Pacific’s purchases of sustainable aviation fuel. We had joined in the registry’s first cohort of users, and the transaction followed in June 2025, in the registry’s first months of operation.
The reason to say so here is not the flag. A registry is infrastructure, and infrastructure is proven by what runs on it. The transaction showed a corporate claim settle on the new system end to end, from an airline’s fuel purchase to a named buyer’s retirement statement.
Not the only registry, deliberately
Our transactions settle across independent registries: the RSB Book and Claim Registry, the Assure SAF Registry operated by 4AIR, and IATA’s CADO SAF Registry. In 2026, 4AIR and CADO began work on making their registries interoperable, which points where the market is heading: one set of rules for counting once, whichever ledger the entry sits on.
For a buyer, the registry name matters less than what the entry gives you: a retirement statement naming the batch, the reduction and you. What a SAF certificate is shows what that document records.