With the cryptocurrency industry gradually shifting to more environmentally friendly innovations to limit its carbon footprint, Elrond has recently announced that it is now carbon negative. Thus, it has become the first European blockchain project to achieve the feat.
According to a Thursday press release shared with CryptoPotato, the internet-scale blockchain project revealed that it has compensated for more CO2 than its network is utilizing.
Elrond noted that it is fully committed to ensuring that its technology is making a positive contribution to the planet. For that reason, it has partnered with Offsetra, a company that is focused on reducing carbon emissions to help it decrease its carbon footprint.
Experts from Offsetra were able to negate its carbon status by first conducting an in-depth analysis of the Elrond blockchain emissions.
They analyzed the amount of energy consumed by over 5,000 servers in 30 different countries scattered across 6 continents, the network connecting them, in addition to the environmental impact of its operations.
Offsetra discovered that Elrond’s carbon footprint was around 6M kg which was subsequently offset by retiring units equivalent to 7.4M kg CO2, earning a 25% positive impact on the environment for the Elrond blockchain.
The project’s CEO and co-founder Benjamin Mincu believes the milestone will help it stay ahead and make it a suitable platform for future innovators.
“By offsetting more CO2 that our blockchain is responsible for, we can stay ahead of ecosystem growth and make Elrond into a fertile ground for this generation of innovators to seed the foundations of a digital network of trust for the generations to come,” Mincu said.
Lately, the issue of carbon emission from crypto activities like mining has made many skeptical of becoming a part of this industry. The energy concern was the main reason Elon Musk’s electric car company, Tesla, temporarily stopped accepting bitcoins for its products.
Some blockchains using Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm consume more energy than the amount utilized by a medium-sized country to handle very few computational processes.
However, the Elrond network currently has a capacity of 15,000 transactions per second, which is scalable beyond 100,000 TPS. This brings a 1,000-fold improvement in throughput and execution speed, and the energy required for processing a transaction is up to six million times lower.