Climate Impact

Blockchain technology is far from homogeneous, meaning that blanket statements about its energy consumption should be reviewed with care.

EyA Climate Statement

An agreed commitment to low energy use was developed during the conception of EyA and initiated the search and development of the lowest possible use of energy whilst drawing consistent performance from the entire stack of technologies employed. The board within EyA has ensured that the commitment will continue and through use of data centres employing green energy, it is aimed to reduce carbon footprint to net zero over the next five years.

The Challenge

To pinpoint the lowest energy, but highest performing layer one platform.

During the discovery phase of the EyA timeline, multiple layer one solutions were tested and researched not only in regards to performance and flexibility, but also the energy requirements required to provide a highly scaleable and efficient platform for the development of the higher level technologies within the stack.

The Contenders

Bitcoin

With Bitcoin’s ageing architecture and Proof of Work (PoW) requirements, it has long been understood that vast energy is required as “miners” compete to complete complex calculations in order to be rewarded with a small quantity of Bitcoin. Also, the overall wallet and lack of permissions led Bitcoin to not be acceptable for the EyA platform.

Hyperledger Fabric

Hyperledger does provide permission blockchain and with a much lower energy consumption within an enterprise network, could be considered a suitable platform to develop upon. However, the number of transactions and internal concerns with regards to flexibility and enhancement due to the modular architecture placed Hyperledger into a state of “possible, but there must be something more suitable”.

Ethereum

Ethereum 1.0 albeit less energy consuming than Bitcoin still uses the PoW method and consumes far too much energy to be a serious contender to develop upon. Even considering a layer 2 approach to developing upon, the framework still is more targeted toward B2C rather than B2B2C.

Corda

Corda, albeit was originally developed for the financial sector provides a robust enterprise grade DLT, rather than blockchain. Energy efficiency is extremely good and real time notary based ledger entries remove the need for both PoW and Proof of Stake (PoS). However, EyA was to be developed to not only provide P2P transactions, but also distribution of public marked data and files across the public side of the EyA cloud. The flexibility of Corda with a great deal of development on top of it has meant that the decision was made to use Corda as the layer 1 platform and develop the Operating System of EyA on top of it.

Future Proofing Energy Use

EyA has developed the governance committee to not only ensure fit and proper business execution and privacy for all users, but to also continue to monitor and keep the initial founders commitment toward not making a negative impact on the climate a reality. The EyA board will work alongside the committee and technology / cloud providers to locate the greenest data centres when scaling globally and provide yearly reports of cloud energy use both overall and per transaction. The diagram below depicts the typical energy uses of various technologies and EyA intends to be the lowest.