Blockchain ≠ Green? Polkadot May Become a Web3 “Eco-Friendly” Benchmark
What does an eco-friendly green blockchain look like? This seems like a strange question. For a long time, blockchain has been criticized for energy consumption. It seems to be incompatible with “ecological environmental protection”.
In fact, the crypto industry is starting a vigorous “green blockchain” movement. It is mainly through underlying technological reforms and funding low-carbon projects, which tries to reverse the negative evaluation that “the crypto industry endangers the health of the earth”.
Messari recently wrote “The Regenerative Finance Movement”, which compared the carbon footprints of PoW and PoS of several major blockchains today. It shows that Polkadot, with 21 parachains, more than 250 Dapps, 2500 nodes, including 297 active validators, is the “greenest” Layer1 blockchain. How does Polkadot stand out among blockchains and achieve a low-carbon footprint? How does it empower environmental protection? What is the potential of green blockchain? These questions deserve our in-depth exploration.
The environment of the earth concerns everyone. Since the accelerated industrial growth in the last century, global surface temperatures have risen rapidly. Reducing the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere to sustainable levels is an extremely difficult task. However, with the development of blockchain technology, it not only makes continuous progress in energy consumption and environmental protection, but can also use its advanced technology to help the rapid development of global ecological environmental protection. The following focuses on Polkadot, the “environmental protection” benchmark of blockchain. We will take a look at its “eco-friendly” footprint.
Underlying Design: Environmental Consensus Mechanism NPoS
At present, the mainstream consensus mechanism of blockchain has two categories: PoW(Proof of Work) and PoS(Proof of Stake). Polkadot’s consensus mechanism takes the “nominated proof of stake”, or NPoS(Nominated Proof of Stake), which is a variant of the PoS mechanism.
In the PoW mechanism, the performance of the machine determines the level of computing power, which directly affects the amount of rewards of users. In the PoS mechanism, the rewards are “time units” and “reward quantity”. Their cost is mainly derived from the annual inflation rate of the public chain. Therefore, Polkadot using the NPoS mechanism also inherits this advantage — users do not need to consume a lot of power resources through high-configuration machines to obtain rewards. In turn, the concept of environmental protection is realized in the underlying design.
According to the Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance, Bitcoin consumes over 90 TWh per year. In the Polkadot ecosystem, which currently has about 1,000 verifiers for a year. It consumes 0.8 GWh of energy, which is only 0.001% of Bitcoin. The above data shows the “environmental protection” of Polkadot.
In addition, Polkadot achieves a balance between environmental protection and high performance when designing the ground up. For the majority of developers and users, the most concerned is the performance of the public chain.
NPoS consensus mechanism of Polkadot has been a great improvement over previous PoW and PoS. Compared with PoS, NPoS ensures the security of the chain to the greatest extent by setting the two roles of nominator and validator. It also borrows from the election method proposed by Swedish mathematicians to make the network sufficiently decentralized.
All in all, NPoS realizes the decentralization and high security performance of the Polkadot on a more environmentally friendly basis.
Kusama Treasury Grant: Wildlife Protection
In Polkadot’s Layer1 protocol, low-level consensus on eco-friendly design gives it the lowest carbon footprint, but the contribution of Polkadot to the environment doesn’t stop. Currently, the Kusama Treasury has approved funding for the KWT Hackathon, organized by the Sovereign Nature Initiative in partnership with the Kenya Wildlife Trust (KWT: an NGO dedicated to the conservation of wildlife and its ecology).
Sovereign Nature Initiative is a non-profit foundation that has been approved by the Kusama Treasury on several occasions to fund SNI activities. The organization aims to protect wildlife by building Web3. They support NGOs to restore and protect diverse ecosystems.
The current KWT Hackathon (October 7 — November 6) is an online Hackathon. It provides a Crowdsourcing solution for wildlife identification through computer vision technology. It adds these identities to Web3 data and the SSI protocol to present these identities in different ways in Metaverse.
Currently, wildlife conservation efforts such as lions use manual techniques that require up to 6 months of image processing, resulting in isolated physical files. KWT Hackathon focuses on lion protection. Wild lions have special physical characteristics. They are more difficult to identify than other predators, so this data is crucial for wild lions and ecological conservation. The Hackathon will focus on the following two challenges:
- Identify lions through computer vision models. It enhances the lion recognition process.
- Mitigate predator-farmer-pastoralists conflicts through spatiotemporal prediction models and other conflict mitigation methods.
Learn more:
https://www.wildlabs.net/event/online-hackathon-predators-conservation-maasai-mara
Polkadot Parachains: Contributing to Climate Action
As the tipping point of climate change approaches, environmental protection issues have become one of the important factors shackling the development of Web3. In addition to supporting environmental protection projects, there are also many projects in Polkadot that use technological advantages to actively respond to environmental protection issues. They create green and environmentally friendly Polkadot.
Sequester
The design of Polkadot shared security provides a unique opportunity. It starts changing the rules of how we assess carbon emissions in the economic system without making any changes to the user experience.
— — Brendan Edelson, Founder of Sequester
Sequester aims to turn Polkadot into a “carbon-negative” infrastructure by collecting fees from parachains, exchanging them for carbon credit tokens and burning them. Specifically, the parachain sends a portion of the fees that need to be burned to Sequester, which automatically converts them into carbon credit tokens. Sequester then burns tokens to offset carbon emissions.
Since the commission itself is much higher than the hardware cost used by Polkadot. Hence, converting a small part of the handling fee into carbon credit tokens and burning it can fully offset the carbon emissions generated by the operation of Polkadot. It even makes Polkadot a truly “carbon negative” environmental protection infrastructure.
Bitgreen
Bitgreen is a decentralized sustainability platform that aims to use blockchain technology to drive capital to support sustainable development. Bitgreen’s green DeFi platform provides a marketplace for exchanging high-quality carbon credits and impact investing. Web3 builders can take advantage of Bitgreen’s impact banking infrastructure and technology framework to initiate and tokenize natural capital assets and carbon credits.
Currently, Polkadot parachains are partnering with the Bitgreen and Sequester teams. Sequester will release a set of tools to automate the process of aggregating transaction fees into carbon supported tokens. It includes a Donations module and a Common Good chain.
Bitgreen and Sequester have pioneered new environmental protection models, which show that the blockchain industry and environmental protection are not “incompatible”.
Conclusion
Nowadays, with the global push for ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) standards, the combination of environmental protection and blockchain is the trend. “Related projects are expected to expand to a multi-trillion dollar market in the coming years.”
How the blockchain industry responds to ecological and environmental issues? There is no doubt that more practitioners to devote their efforts. The energy loss problem faced by public chains with PoW mechanism is bound to be at odds with the increasingly serious environmental issues. While the shift from PoW to PoS after the merge, the upgrade of Ethereum is expected to reduce its energy consumption by a hundred times. It implies the importance of solving environmental issues in the Web3 field. Will the PoW mechanism with high energy consumption be eliminated in the future? Will the development of technology completely solve the problem of energy consumption in the blockchain industry?
As a practitioner of blockchain environmental protection, Polkadot ecosystem has used technology to construct the underlying design of environmental protection and low carbon. They use treasury funds to explore the infinite possibilities of “green blockchain” together with ecological projects. It will take more creative Web3 practitioners to explore how to use the good foundation provided by Ecology, empower the environmental protection industry with blockchain technology, solve the painful problems in traditional environmental protection, and even help
Reference:
The Regenerative Finance Movement
Polkadot and Tezos Decreed Most Energy Efficient Blockchains
Polkadot Energy Consumption: why this is a game-changer for blockchains & for the environment
Bitgreen and Sequester Pioneer Climate-Positive Action for the Polkadot Ecosystem
About OneBlock+
OneBlock+ is the first and the largest blockchain developer community in China. At OneBlock+, we provide full support for developers with their substrate studies and further set off their career paths. We host Polkadot Hackathons every season to attract top-notch developers to build and innovate for the prosperity of the ecosystem. As a greater China technology resource integrator, OneBlock+ also partners with developers, communities, business elites, and key media who have business insights and experiences in the blockchain industry to provide educational events, such as technical courses, webinars, AMAs, and offline events for the industry. Want to shape the crypto world together? Come and join us today!
