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How NEAR Went Carbon Neutral

 

NEAR's Path to Carbon Neutrality



Climate change, like the pandemic, is a worldwide catastrophe that is rapidly requiring the attention of the international community. It is a worldwide imperative that will necessitate a great deal of collaboration across various businesses and markets in order to assist reduce its effects. As a result, the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) in 2021 is crucial.

Silicon Valley isn't frequently singled out for its carbon footprint, yet each company contributes to a far bigger carbon consumption total. You're on the electrical grid if you're a web-based firm, which implies your platform is almost definitely powered by fossil fuels.

NEAR has been focused on a computational alternative to PoW from its birth. There are no miners in this system, which is known as Proof-of-Stake (PoS). Validators, on the other hand, must stake a certain quantity of tokens in order to participate. Communities are rewarded for owning and controlling the network in PoS blockchains. Only then will they be able to validate blocks and receive a block award.

PoS is a key component of NEAR's basic ideals of simplicity, scalability, and security, and it will assist to reimagine business, creativity, and community. We've been actively implementing these ideals to help others reinvent the world, and do it in a carbon-neutral way, since we debuted amid growing concern about climate change.

NEAR's PoS, which we refer to as Nightshade, allows the platform to achieve its goal of being simple, scalable, and secure. However, sharding helps NEAR to meet its carbon neutral objective on a social and ecological level.

Climate change activities on the NEAR platform go beyond PoS and sharding. NEAR invited South Pole, a major Zurich-based project developer and worldwide climate solutions supplier, to audit NEAR's carbon footprint as part of its effort to make the ecosystem climate neutral. We also sought for advice on how to reduce our carbon footprint when possible, and where that wasn't possible, how NEAR might offset the carbon it did have.

The carbon footprint of NEAR Foundation, the Core Collective (all workers and contractors working on the protocol), and all validators were all audited by South Pole. NEAR Protocol emits 174 tonnes of CO2 per year, making it 200,000 times more energy efficient than Bitcoin, according to the startup. Much of this is due to NEAR's use of PoS rather than PoW technology. As previously stated, the increased throughput of blockchain technology means that our carbon footprint will only increase marginally in the next years.

The future of blockchain is NEAR's PoS and Nightshade architecture. However, there are a slew of other intriguing developments and opportunities on the horizon, particularly when increased throughput leads to more usage and app development. Open Forest Protocol, a forestation tracking tool built on NEAR, was recently released.

Many more dApp developers are expected to launch initiatives on the NEAR ecosystem that deal directly with environmental sustainability in the near future (no pun intended).

 

Projects focusing on tracing the provenance of recycling programmes are already being developed in the blockchain business. More blockchain-based supply chain validations will be seen, providing local producers of commodities with fairer, more sustainable revenues for their families and communities.

DeFi will also play a significant part in climate change mitigation. Imagine a world where people all around the world may contribute to climate change projects in a decentralised manner, circumventing both bureaucratic red tape and any resistance or hesitancy from centralised financial institutions and businesses.

We want the NEAR community, which is rapidly expanding, to redefine the world.

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