Electroneum has once again gone to where no other cryptocurrency in the industry has gone, becoming the most eco-friendly blockchain in existence.
Introduced earlier this week, Electroneum’s new Moderated Blockchain, powered by their revolutionary Proof of Responsibility protocol, brings unprecedented levels of security to the cryptocurrency, increases functionality and transaction speeds. But that’s not all!
Electroneum’s new Proof of Responsibility protocol drastically reduces the blockchain’s energy consumption. From the previous Proof of Work protocol which required equivalent energy to light approximately 2.4 million light bulbs every day, all day, Electroneum’s new blockchain requires enough energy to light just one light bulb*.
“We are making a massive difference. You have to take into consideration that nobody has their lights on all day, whilst mining machines run 24/7,” says Electroneum CEO Richard Ells. “So in reality, before the fork, ETN miners were consuming enough electricity to power 14 million light bulbs. This is equivalent to lighting up 700,000 houses every day. Now, we are consuming about as much electricity as one average home uses to light up their porch throughout the night.”
“We had our light bulb moment,” says Electroneum head of blockchain Chris Harrison. “We created a highly unique and clever new ecologically responsible way to mine cryptocurrency.”
Richard Ells states the Electroneum team decided it was no longer sustainable to have thousands of miners running close to around 125,000 ASIC mining rigs that were using up four Giga hashes of computing power.
“We developed a way to eliminate all these rigs and to reduce the rate of hashing millions of times from over four Giga hashes to under one half of a kilo hash. We concluded that it was time to stop destroying the environment and drastically reduce our carbon footprint.”
To put this in perspective, Bitcoin, for example, has a carbon footprint equal to that of Las Vegas, according to scientists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).
TUM lead researcher Christian Stoll wrote a report saying that all mineable currencies put together consume about 60 TWh of power in a year, which is twice the power output of Sri Lanka, which has a population of over 21 million.
Greenpeace Senior IT Sector Analyst Gary Cook said, “If Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies hope to maintain their social license in a world that is increasingly driven to action by the Climate Emergency, not only must there be changes to the ‘Proof of Work’ model to make mining far less energy intensive, but mining must also be restricted to locations where mining is powered by renewable sources of electricity, and not driving new demand for fossil fuels.”
And this is exactly what Electroneum has done by moving from Proof of Work to Proof of Responsibility, eliminating the massive consumption of energy to nearly nothing and by bringing in responsible and trusted miners that use their block rewards to help people on the ground gain skills and training to improve their lives.
Proof of Responsibility is a paradigm shift by Electroneum towards sustainable and responsible mining that thrusts the cryptocurrency industry to a new era.
*Energy saving 15w bulb