Cryptocurrency has a reputation for being heavily energy-intensive, but a new platform is trying to flip the script.
In a press release shared by Cointelegraph, Alephium detailed how it had been chosen to be the foundational blockchain in a partnership with Gigatons, a platform dedicated to significantly reducing carbon dioxide pollution.
Alephium is a proof-of-work blockchain, meaning it helps to process peer-to-peer cryptocurrency transactions without the need for a third party, except the organization is dubbing its verification technology "energy-efficient Proof-of-Less-Work (PoLW) consensus" with the goal of "significantly reducing energy consumption while maintaining the highest security and decentralization standards."Â
Traditionally, proof-of-work consensus is considered more energy-intensive than proof-of-stake, which the Ethereum platform transitioned to in 2022. Ethereum recently reported that helped it cut its associated carbon pollution by 99.95%.
According to Alephium, its "Less-Work" consensus is "uniquely scalable and energy efficient, making it the ideal solution for high-impact projects like Gigatons that require scalability, security and environmental responsibility." The release did not provide extensive details on how much energy it can save or its methods of doing so, but Cheng Wang, the inventor of the "Proof-of-Less-Work" concept and founder of Alephium, discussed the principles in a 2022 company Medium post.
Gigatons is hoping to use cryptocurrency coins to "bridge traditional finance (TradFi) with decentralized (DeFi) and regenerative finance (ReFi) to verify carbon impact." This means investors can tokenize their investment dollars and track how projects they invest in can reduce carbon pollution.
So far, Gigatons — which is an offshoot of UK electric vehicle charging business Gridserve — has two net-zero projects. One is a collaboration with Flow Power to bring an EV charging network to Australia, and another is the launch of a bitcoin mining project with Hearst that utilizes solar power.
According to a United Nations study, bitcoin mining activity between 2020 and 2021 consumed 173.42 terawatt-hours of electricity. Despite the rise of renewable energy sources, the electricity grid is still mostly reliant on polluting dirty fuels.
The UN said bitcoin's polluting impact was equivalent to burning 84 billion pounds of coal, and to offset the environmental damage, 3.9 billion trees would need to be planted.
What's more, bitcoin also used enough water to fill over 660,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools during this time, while mining activity also required land that was 1.4 times the size of Los Angeles, per the UN report.
If the Gigatons platform achieves what it sets out to, it could help mitigate some of these problems. However, it remains to be seen whether such a partnership with Alephium will be successful in its goals to mobilize $100 billion for green investment.
"After evaluating all options, Alephium stood out as the only decentralized blockchain able to deliver the scalability, security, programmability and sustainability we need," the co-CEO of Gigatons and CEO of Gigatech Heston Harper said in the statement.
"This partnership equips us with the cutting-edge technology required to safeguard and mobilize the $100 billion we aim to tokenize over the next decade, driving our ambitious mission in the net-zero era."
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