The Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute announced that the Polkadot blockchain consumes the least amount of electricity and leaves the lowest carbon footprint in the atmosphere among other networks based on the PoS algorithm.
Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute (CCRI) researchers Ulrich Gallersdörfer, Lena Klaaßen and Christian Stoll analyzed six blockchains using the Proof-of-Stake consensus algorithm. According to CCRI experts, the annual energy consumption of the networks looks like this: Polkadot (70,237 kWh), Tezos (94,120 kWh), Algorand (512,671 kWh), Cardano (598,755 kWh), Solana (1 967,930 kWh) and Avalanche (489,311 kWh). By the way, the study was commissioned by Avalanche Inc.
For comparison, data on the annual electricity consumption of the Ethereum (17.3 TWh) and Bitcoin (89.78 TWh) networks are also presented.
Using DeFiLlama data for February 1, 2022, the researchers calculated the energy efficiency of blockchains. Avalanche is $18,454/kWh, while Solana is $4,395/kWh, Tezos is $943/kWh, Algorand is $161/kWh, Cardano is $120/kWh, and Polkadot is $19.18/kWh. kWh
The calculations were made in several stages. First, the minimum hardware requirements were analyzed to calculate the minimum and maximum electricity consumption of one node when connected to the network and when “idle”. The researchers then estimated how much electricity the entire network consumed. To do this, they collected information about the size of blockchains, since the number of nodes significantly affects the amount of electricity consumed. In addition, the workload of individual hardware devices for each network was compared. The power consumption of loaded nodes was multiplied by the number of nodes in the network.
To calculate the carbon footprint left by a particular blockchain, the carbon intensity coefficient for various regions and the international average coefficient were also used. At the last stage, additional data (transaction data) was analyzed to create a metric for the energy efficiency and throughput of each blockchain.
The researchers concluded that these Proof-of-Stake networks consume quite a bit of electricity, so when evaluating them, more attention should be paid to such factors as decentralization, network bandwidth and functionality.
“Because of the energy-intensive protocols based on Proof-of-Work, the public believes that blockchain-based networks can harm the environment. However, it is important to understand that there are differences between Proof-of-Stake protocols and these networks impact the environment in different ways. Our study confirms that PoS-based protocols consume a small fraction of the electricity compared to Bitcoin,” said Gallersdörfer.
Recall that at the end of January, the vice-chairman of the European Securities Market Supervision Authority (ESMA), Erik Thedeen, called on regulators to ban the mining of cryptocurrencies operating on the PoW consensus algorithm. He called these cryptocurrencies a large-scale problem that could change the climate.
Source: Bits
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