We should all know what NFT’s are at this point. It is a hot topic right now, as is the metaverse. But what most people haven’t been made aware of is, their impact on the environment. These blockchains run-on high-energy consumption to be created and checked through what is called the “proof of work” system, through cryptocurrency companies such as Ethereum. The way this works to oversee transactions is that the system forces “miners” to compete by solving complex puzzles to basically land the job of verifying transactions to a blockchain. These miners will then receive a reward once the job is completed. The process is incredibly inefficient on purpose, according to The Verge. This encourages someone to be less likely to screw up the ledger because of how much energy it takes. A.K.A. how much money it costs to do. Let’s look at some figures that were put together in an article written by VICE. “Based on data from the Energy Information Administration, there are 0.85lbs. of CO2 released into the air per kWh of energy used. If you multiply this by the amount of energy spent on each transaction on Ethereum, this equals 120.7lbs of CO2 for every NFT created. This is 6.16 times the CO2 of burning one gallon of gasoline…. Ethereum uses as much electricity as the country of Lybia.” Those numbers are absolutely staggering! Is there a solution? As it turns out there may actually be one option. To rid the system of this energy consuming proof-of-work system, some have proposed what is called a proof-of-stake mechanism instead. This system uses validators and chooses them based on the number of tokens they have instead of having them compete with complex puzzles to see who will validate the block chain. This requires much less energy because “the time it takes for the proof-of-stake algorithm to choose a validator is significantly quicker” (Blockworks). Does this seem like a good solution? We don’t really know, but it seems like it may be a step in the right direction. Since this space is so new at this point, there is still much to learn. However, it seems that the metaverse may create a whole lot of negative impacts on the environment from where we stand now.
