Enhancing Cu-ligand interaction for efficient CO reduction towards multi-carbon products.

Electrochemical CO reduction (COR) to valuable products provides a promising strategy to enable CO utilization sustainably. Here, we report the strategy of using Cu-DAT (3,5-diamino-1,2,4-triazole) as a catalyst precursor for efficient CO reduction, demonstrating over 80% selectivity towards multicarbon products at 400 mA cm, with intrinsic activity over 19 times higher than that of Cu nanoparticles. The catalysts active phase is determined to be metallic copper wrapped with the DAT ligand. We attribute this enhanced COR performance to the accelerated steps of *CO adsorption and C-C coupling induced by the closely cooperated DAT ligand.