Review of Cryptocurrency Energy Consumption on Earth Day

• US mining firms consume more electricity than any third-world country.
• Ethereum’s shift to PoS reduced energy consumption by 99.9%.
• Blockchain companies that have been carbon conscious are Ecoterra and Chia.

On this Earth Day, let’s look at some of the green cryptocurrencies in the market. The general accusation made against cryptocurrency and its backend technology is high energy consumption. Reports in the past few years have stated that US mining firms consume more electricity than any third-world country.

Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism does consume enormous energy due to its complex back-end processing. So as the second most prominent crypto, Ethereum shifted to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) last year, reducing the consumption by 99.9%. Now it is only ~0.0026 TWh/yr, whereas Bitcoin’s consumption is ~100 TWh/yr.

Focusing on some other cryptos, blockchain companies that have been carbon conscious from the start are Ecoterra and Chia. Ecoterra is a “blockchain ecosystem designed to energize climate action.” The platform offers Ecoterra tokens to every user for recycling materials. 

Chia works on a mechanism known as Proof-of-Space-and-Time. The platform is said to be consuming a drastically lesser amount of energy (500 times) than the market lead BTC. Other L2 networks that are energy awake are Cardano, Tezos, Polkadot, Avalanche, Algorand, and Solana.

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