In Solana We Trust — Simplifying the World’s Greenest Currency
When it comes to crypto, there’s one word thats comes to mind: Volatility.
Shortly after that would be: unpredictability, uncertainty, and safety.
These are all valid concerns, but we think with a brief overview that we can help to assuage some of these fears and provide some insight into why we chose to mint through their platform.
What is crypto really?
For the sake of alignment, Cryptocurrency is defined as: a digital or virtual currency that is secured by cryptography, which makes it nearly impossible to counterfeit or double-spend.
To put it simply, it’s digital money that works in a similar manner as the currencies that we use and exchange everyday.
So in the same way that the money that you spend ends up showing on your monthly bank statement — crypto transactions are stored on a public blockchain.
What is the blockchain?
The blockchain is a nifty invention that resembles apps like venmo, where your spends and sends are recorded, oftentimes publicly, and cannot be edited after-the-fact to show proof of authenticity. It can be defined as: a system of recording information in a way that makes it difficult or impossible to change, hack, or cheat.
Solana: Simplified
Now that we’ve cleared up the essentials, what the heck is Solana you say?
Well, we’re glad you asked.
Solana’s team describes the technology as: the most performant blockchain built for mass adoption.
It’s designed for high performance use cases like payments, NFTs, gaming, social networking, and finance. It gives developers the confidence to build for the long term by delivering predictable scaling without compromising security.
— Solana Team
FIREWATCH Explained
FIREWATCH is a project made up of carefully crafted pieces of NFT art that represent the California landscape.
Each NFT is partitioned across the state, and the purchase of each digital parcel will pool money that goes towards projects that affect the respective region.
All proceeds will go entirely to our partners at One Tree Planted to support fire prevention, mitigation, and reforestation efforts as needed.
Why NFTs?
Common questions that we’ve been asked include:
- Why NFTs? What role do they play in bringing this project to life?
- Couldn’t we just as easily use normal donations?
The simple answer being, donations in dollars obviously have a similar potential for impact — but the main difference is the transparency that cryptocurrency provides. We‘re able to track and show that the money raised is indeed going to our partners at One Tree Planted.
Donors are also awarded a nifty piece of art in the form of the NFT itself, which serves as proof of their humanitarian interest in the planet, while providing the double benefit of holding value of its own.
Ideally, the art itself can be bought and resold, with 25% of resale funds going to One Tree Planted in perpetuity.
It sounds complicated, but it’s actually very simple, and pretty cool.
Why Solana?
Aside from being endorsed by the likes of Shaquille O’Neil, Solana proved to be a crowd favorite for all of the right reasons. The main one being its energy efficiency.
In line with our eco-concious ethos, it was important for us to align ourselves with technology that has sustainability built right into it’s core.
As a result of the earth-crushing energy consumption of blockchain early adopters like Bitcoin and Ethereum — climate activists and concerned citizens have slammed both of these technologies for being an unsustainable stressor on the environment as we know it.
This has led blockchains like Ethereum to follow Solana’s lead, and aim to cut their energy costs by 99% — Another testament to the type of leadership that we like to see at the heart of Solana’s value structure.
Solana’s Benefits
Solana is known for a few outstanding characteristics:
- Speed
- Scalability
- Reliability
- Energy Efficiency
This means that payments are fast enough for many people to use freely without long wait times (like bitcoin) and has a robust enough infrastructure to handle a large amount of transactions at one time.
Those attributes are all crucial to a coin thats aiming for mass-adoption.
Energy Costs
Cryptocurrency in it’s digital nature, uses a system of computers and nodes to make trades. Every time a payment is processed, it costs energy.
To put things in context:
- One Bitcoin transaction: 7,412,400,000 Joules
- One Ethereum transaction: 777,600,00 Joules
- One Gallon of Gasoline: 121,320,000 Joules
- One Solana transaction: 1,989 Joules
From an energy standpoint, this makes Solana the clear winner by a landslide — and in this case — we like landslides.
Positivity for the naysayers
Climate activists, and general well-wishers of the Earth are fervently opposed to crypto and subsequently NFTs for their notoriously exorbitant energy expenditure. Enter: Solana. Being that our project is eco-concious — future-forward — and sustainability focused; we naturally opted for a coin that boasts the benefits of speed AND environmental-friendliness to help us carry out this necessary work.
What you need to know
Hate it or love it, crypto is here for the forseeable future — but with wildfires and their damage per capita increasing at alarming rates every year; California’s forests, unfortunately are not.
It’s up to us as a human race to take the measures necessary to preserve the habitats that conversely, preserve us as a species and our ways of life.
