Eco-Friendly
Report claims each Solana TX uses less energy than 2 Google searches
The report also found that a transaction on the Solana blockchain uses 24 times less energy than charging your phone.
A transaction on the Solana network takes less energy than two Google searches, and 24 times less energy than charging your phone, according to a Nov. 25 report by the Solana Foundation.
The report states that a single transaction on its network uses 0.00051 kWh, or 1,836 Joules, of energy. According to Google, an average search uses 0.0003 kWh or 1,080 Joules of energy.
Perhaps more surprisingly, the report claims the entire Solana network uses an estimated 3,186,000 kWh per year, which is equivalent to the average electricity usage of 986 American households.
In May, the Solana Foundation contracted Robert Murphy to write the report in order to “frame the environmental impact” of transactions on the Solana network. Murphy is the founder of Othersphere and was formerly an Energy Specialist at the World Bank.
The Solana network is less decentralized than Bitcoin or Ethereum with 1,196 validator nodes that process an estimated 20 million transactions per year. The report states the Foundation will further reduce the network’s energy usage by implementing a program before the end of this year to become carbon-neutral and offset the environmental footprint of the ecosystem. No additional information was provided on whether the network plans to purchase carbon offsets or actually reduce its emissions.
As Solana (SOL) relies on a Proof of Stake consensus mechanism, the network is far less energy intensive than those relying on the Proof of Work mining method such as Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH). Statista estimates that a single BTC transaction uses an average of 4,222,800,000 joules.
It should be noted that networks technically do not use any particular amount of energy for an individual transaction. The energy usage of the network can be the same whether it processes one transaction or one million. However it is often used as a rough, if contested, comparison,
With that in mind, one Ethereum transaction uses about 644,004,000 joules based on the average number of transactions and amount of energy required to run the network. According to Statista, the energy consumption of one ETH transaction is comparable to “more than several thousands of VISA card transactions.”
Related: Crypto’s climate impact: Are carbon offsets good enough?
However Eth2 is expected to use about 99% less energy than the current mainnet following the switch to Proof of take.
Another low-energy alternative is Ripple (XRP), which uses 28,440 Joules per transaction. Ripple says that for every million transactions on its network, the amount of energy used could’ve powered a light bulb for 79,000 hours.
For the same amount of transactions, the energy used by BTC could power a light bulb for 4.51 billion hours. For this reason, Ripple claims that XRP is 57,000 times more efficient than BTC.
Chia raises $61M for ‘eco-friendly’ crypto despite critics
Chia Network has raised $61 million in funding from leading tech investors including Andreesen Horowitz and Naval Ravikant for its supposedly eco-friendly crypto network.
Blockchain startup “Chia Network” has raised $61 million in a funding round which included investment from top venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Richmond Global Ventures.
The decentralized smart contract platform was valued at around $500 million in the funding round, according to an anonymous source cited by Bloomberg. The funding round was also backed by the CEO and co-founder of AngelList Naval Ravikant, Breyer Capital, and True Ventures.
Chia’s president and CFO, Gene Hoffman, told Bloomberg the firm hopes to go public through an initial public offering, or IPO, this year:
Blockchain startup “Chia Network” has raised $61 million in a funding round which included investment from top venture capital firms Andreessen Horowitz and Richmond Global Ventures.
“Our goal has always been to go public relatively quickly as that will significantly clarify our regulatory environment and allow customers to use currency to hedge public market volatility, which is different from other coins.”
The Chia Network was founded in 2017 by the creator of BitTorrent, Bram Cohen, and raised more than $3.3 million in a seed round led by Ravikant and Andreessen Horowitz in 2018. The firm describes its Chia token (XCH) as “green money for a digital world.”
The Chia Network’s principal value proposition is its unique consensus mechanism, “Proof of Space and Time.” The consensus method purports to offer far greater energy efficiency than Proof-of-Work mining, seeking to identify unutilized computing power on validators’ hard drives.
To create or “farm” XCH, users install Chia’s software that writes cryptographic data known as “plots” to the their hard drive. The blockchain broadcasts a problem for each new block approximately every 18 seconds — with the likelihood of an individual winning the block determined by the availability of unused computational resources provided by farmers.
Despite the firm touting XCH as a green alternative to Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, some have questioned the network’s eco-friendly claims.
In a May 23 article titled Chia Is a New Way to Waste Resources for Cryptocurrency, David Gerard, the author of Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain, slammed Chia for being “heavy on electricity” and requiring “multiple CPU threads running continuously at close to 100 percent” for farming.
Gerard emphasized that Chia’s plotting process typically uses a computer’s solid-state drive, or SSD, and can burn out an SSD in less than six weeks. By comparison, SSDs subjected to regular usage typically have a lifespan lasting more than a decade.
“Instead of carbon dioxide, Chia produces vast quantities of e-waste—rare metals, assembled into expensive computing components, turned into toxic near-unrecyclable landfill within weeks.”
Gerrard’s prediction that Chia will drive an increase in computing landfill already appears to have weight, with Fortune reporting hard drive shortages throughout the South-East Asia region in anticipation of XCH’s launch.
"In recent weeks the demand and pricing for high capacity [hard disk drives] has seen a material step higher [...] and enterprise [SSD] prices have also moved higher,” stated an analyst from Bank of America.
“[The] sustainability of this trajectory of Chia's popularity remains unclear,” they added.
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