Within a few days of last week, the World Wildlife Fund made a fuss and then quietly canceled plans to raise funds for conservation efforts by creating its own NFT. The UK branch of WWF has set off a big fire by announcing the “Nature Maintenance Fund for 13 Endangered Species”. Tokens look like glass cubes that wrap each animal, such as giant pandas, Javan rhinos, and Galapagos penguins. And they really offended other environmentalists.
“My first reaction [to World Wildlife Fund’s NFTs] They must be joking … they should all be for sustainable innovation and are involved in one of the least sustainable on the planet, “said frankly about risk. Alex de Vries, a digital currency economist who is doing, says some cryptocurrencies have an impact on the environment.
The World Wildlife Fund seems to believe that it has found a solution to the climate controversy that swirls around NFTs by working with polygons, the so-called layer 2 blockchain connected to the Ethereum network. However, Polygon claims that transactions on the blockchain use very little energy, but deVries states: The Verge That polygon is part of the pollution produced by the infamous energy inefficient Ethereum and does not count it. Taking into account its relationship with Ethereum, de Vries estimates that a single transaction at Polygon is 2,100 times higher than WWF estimates.
At the heart of the discrepancy is whether and where Layer 2 blockchain will reduce energy usage. Most NFTs are part of the Ethereum blockchain, but the way Ethereum validates transactions is slow, expensive, and energy intensive. As Ethereum gets more crowded, companies are looking for new ways to scale it up. A layer 2 blockchain like a polygon can be thought of as a kind of carpool lane added to the Ethereum highway.
Like carpool lanes, Layer 2 networks should be able to track transactions quickly. This, on the surface, saves time and money and saves energy that is important to Polygon’s environmental claims. In a blog post explaining its energy use, Polygon calls itself an “environmentally friendly blockchain scaling Ethereum.” Ethereum uses an energy-intensive system to validate transactions, so de Vries estimates that it has annual carbon dioxide emissions comparable to Singapore. Polygon states that its unique energy and environmental footprint is only part of it, as it uses a different process to validate transactions.
However, passengers in carpool lanes may be individually responsible for less emissions than those who drive the rest of the freeway alone, but with the addition of new lanes, more on the freeway. There is room for contaminated vehicles. Similarly, the Layer 2 solution still works in tandem with the main blockchain, and if that blockchain is energy inefficient, it causes more pollution, according to deVries.
And Ethereum is very inefficient when it comes to energy use. To validate transactions and create new tokens, Ethereum “miners” compete to solve more complex puzzles than ever before. All the computing needed to solve these puzzles is a surge in blockchain energy usage. Bitcoin uses the same kind of process called “Proof of Work”.
In contrast, many new blockchains, including Polygon, use a process called the “proof of stake” to validate transactions. Instead of solving complex puzzles, people need to lock the tokens they already have as collateral in order to be running to validate the transaction and create new tokens. There are no puzzles or exponential energy usage.Experts who are critical of the environmental impact of Ethereum and Bitcoin are generally much more optimistic. Independence Cryptocurrency using Proof of Stake.
However, Polygon is not independent, so the claim that it is an “environmentally friendly blockchain” is at best dissatisfied. De Vries points out that Polygon has contracts representing millions of transactions on the Ethereum network. These contracts are required to move assets between Polygon and Ethereum and to perform other important Polygon functions. De Vries takes into account these contracts validated using Proof of Work in Polygon’s carbon dioxide emissions analysis, which he blogged on Friday. WWF UK said in an NFT announcement that a single transaction at Polygon would produce just 0.207 grams of CO2, but De Vries calculated that the same transaction would produce nearly 430 grams of CO2. did.
Ulrich Gallersdörfer, CEO of the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute, agrees that calculating the energy consumption of Polygon’s blockchain alone would result in an incomplete picture. “Layer 2 solutions can be thought of as independent networks, but because they rely on the security of the underlying Layer 1 network, they depend on power consumption and carbon dioxide emissions,” Gallersdörfer said in an email. States as follows. The Verge..
Another argument for moving transactions to a Layer 2 network is that energy savings can be achieved by bundling multiple transactions. For example, two people exchange multiple NFTs. But in the end, these bundles are returned to Ethereum’s ledger as a single transaction recorded on Ethereum’s energy-inefficient blockchain.
At a more basic level, Layer 2 solutions help the polluted blockchain grow. Polygon allows users to store, use, and trade Ethereum compatible tokens at a lower cost. One of the more advanced Layer 2 solutions is to interconnect your app with other Ethereum compatible blockchains and connect them to the mainchain. All of these features could convince someone to stick to Ethereum and polygons, rather than relying on a truly independent blockchain running on the Proof of Stakes. Ethereum has stated that it will move to the Proof of Stake, but the move has been postponed for so long that deVries and others suspect it will happen.
WWF sang Polygon’s praise when German and British weapons first decided to cast NFTs. “As a result of thorough research and due diligence, the benefits of entering the NFT space for organizations and jobs are worth limiting the environmental impact of creating NFTs with Polygon. I’m sure, “WWFUK is now obsolete. A web page that analyzes how energy usage and emissions from NFTs were calculated. Polygon did not respond to multiple requests for comments from The Verge, And WWFUK refused the interview.
On Friday, the day after the release of “Tokens for Nature,” WWFUK decided to “end this trial.”
“We recognize that NFTs are a very controversial issue and we have a lot to learn about this new market,” the Environmental Group said in a statement. Meanwhile, WWF Germany’s “non-alternative animals,” launched in November, are still raising funds for protection, although the organization states that this is not the ultimate goal. “For us, it wasn’t about funding. It was about raising awareness about the extinction of species,” a WWF German spokesman said in an email. The Verge..
