According to a report published by Solana, the overall carbon footprint has surged by 26% in the last six months.
Unsurprisingly, the analysis shows that a single Bitcoin transaction consumes more power than running the Solana network for an hour. Furthermore, the Solana foundation plans to introduce compressed NFTs where NFT sellers mint up to 10 NFTs in a single transaction.
The Solana foundation continues to uphold the words of Margaret Mead, who once said, “We won’t have a society if we destroy the environment”. In May 2021, the Solana foundation embarked on a mission to learn how big the network’s energy footprint is. The team reached out to one Robert Murphy, an expert in the world of energy and crypto, and asked him to track the network’s environmental impact.
The third report by Murphy on Solana’s network energy usage reveals the following key takeaways;
A 26% increase in the total carbon footprint brought it from 2,707 to 3,412 tonnes of CO2 annually. The validator network’s overall expansion and the addition of emissions from hardware production could have caused the burst out.
The overall carbon footprint is calculated by adding the emissions from hardware production and power consumption. Emissions from energy use made up a significant portion of the total carbon footprint, contributing 1,772 tonnes of CO2 annually, or almost 60%, and 1,639 tonnes of CO2 annually from e-waste.
Main factors leading to the rise in emission
The report highlighted three key factors contributing to the rise in carbon footprint.
- Integrating emissions due to hardware production into the energy use report contributed to 1,639 tonnes of CO2 per year.
- Decreased emissions result from reduced estimated power consumption per validator node. This made a 48% plummet from 984W to 509W per validator node.
- Improved accuracy due to the inclusion of data centre-specific renewable energy utilization. This lowered the average network carbon intensity by 10% from 198 gCO2 per KWh to 180gCO2 per kWh.
More Coming From Solana
The Solana team plans to release new features to make Solana a more energy-efficient harbour.
The aforementioned release of compressed NFTs is one of the features anticipated. Users will be able to mint 8 to 10 compressed NFTs in a single transaction thanks to these NFTs. This will mark a significant turning point in the effort to lower energy use per mint.
The amount of computing power required for a given set of transactions will be significantly reduced by doubling transaction sizes. The Solana network will be able to accomplish more in a single transaction with a small increase in computing power by improving the per-block efficiency of the chain.
At the time of writing, SOL is trading at $32.70, a 0.46% marginal drop in the last 24 hours.
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