A real-time tracking dashboard for monitoring carbon emissions on the Solana blockchain has been made public by the Solana Foundation in partnership with the data platform Trycarbonara.
This is the first “major smart-contract blockchain” to quantify carbon emissions in real-time, according to a blog post from the foundation. The group expects that this would encourage development in the blockchain ecosystem toward carbon emission transparency: “The Solana Foundation hopes to set a new standard for measuring emissions in blockchain by publishing this data.”
On the Solana Climate website, you can see the updated dashboard. There are presently trackers there that show the overall number of nodes, megawatt-hours, average total carbon emissions, and marginal utilization, among many other statistics.
The new dashboard also includes various graphics that compare emissions, allowing users to compare Solana consumption to a variety of other emission-producing activities side by side.
According to the figure, burning a gallon of petrol results in 140,416.67 transactions on the Solana blockchain, but running a Google search results in one and a quarter transactions.
Open-source data that is based on the estimated carbon footprint of the Dell PowerEdge R940 is used to fuel the Solana Foundation’s real-time carbon emissions dashboard.
This initiative by the Solana Foundation coincides with growing international attempts to use blockchain technology to monitor carbon emissions throughout the globe. Whether other blockchain firms will adopt similar monitoring methods is yet to be seen.
The European Commission, a politically independent branch of the European Union’s executive that works in tandem with the European Council, has praised blockchain’s capacity to serve as a foundation for the precise measurement of carbon emissions in any sector as part of its “Shaping Europe’s digital future” initiative.
Smaller networks like Solana are nevertheless dedicated to transparency reports that shed light on consumption, even if the majority of environmental critics’ animosity towards cryptocurrencies is centered on Bitcoin since its proof-of-work mining process uses the most energy of any significant blockchain. The Solana Foundation has regularly requested independent third-party studies of the emissions from the Solana network since November 2021.
