Ripple partnered with Energy Web to tackle the carbon dioxide problem in the cryptocurrency industry

By Selena On Oct 1, 2020

To decarbonize public blockchains, starting with the XRP Ledger, Ripple officially cooperated with Energy Web and Rocky Mountain Institute through the new open-source EW Zero tool. Besides, Ripple promotes new research with top universities to evaluate energy consumption on digital assets, credit card networks, and cash.

Let’s build a sustainable future together. Today we’re launching an open-source tool in partnership with @energywebx and @xrplf to decarbonize ANY blockchain. https://t.co/7P8tevltCg

— Xpring (@XpringDev) September 30, 2020

The blockchain giant is pledging to achieve carbon net-zero by 2030

Ripple is a 500-person fintech company focused on crypto-powered banking. There is an obvious starting point when it comes to reducing the firm’s carbon footprint. Moreover, Ripple uses a consensus system quite unlike Bitcoin’s proof-of-work (PoW) mining, an algorithm that, by definition, must burn through a ton of electricity. (At last count, the top five PoW blockchains currently use up to 170 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity per year – more than the state of New York.)

As such, Bitcoin is really comparable to something like pre-mined XRP running on Ripple, which many would argue much more of a centralized system.

Presented with these observations, Ken Weber, Ripple’s head of social impact, said in this case, it would be beneficial to put technology-based tribal differences aside and adopt more of an all in this together approach.

He said:

“It’s early days for all these currencies, which right now have a tiny share of global finance, but further down the line [green energy adoption] is gonna be much more difficult to reverse engineer. We wanted to help make it easy to adopt these practices. This is not a proprietary wish on Ripple’s part; it’s a whole system with. As with other social change movements, the idea is not to make anybody feel bad or shamed, but to give them the means to do this that is reasonable, beneficial, and participatory. ”

To show how a large blockchain can switch to a zero-carbon footprint, Energy Web is teaming up with Ripple

Energy Web, a non-profit focused on decentralized approaches to decarbonizing the grid, wants to show how a large blockchain platform can switch to a zero-carbon footprint. Ripple’s support of this venture is intended to open the door to other blockchains with more energy-intensive operations like Bitcoin.

To make all this possible, the non-profit has released an open-source app called EW Zero that makes it easy for individuals, businesses, or even entire blockchain ecosystems to make the transition. This initial deployment uses energy attribute certificates (EACs) from renewable energy sources to decarbonize electricity.

Jesse Morris, Energy’s Web chief commercial officer, stated:

“Blockchains are a massive energy hog, and a lot of that electricity is not coming from wind, solar, hydro, or other sustainable facilities. So we have been thinking for a while now about how we could help the crypto industry decarbonize blockchains, given the distributed nature of the technology. ”

Alex de Vries, the founder of Digiconomist, said:

“Ripple is leveraging the fact that people associate heavy energy consumption with blockchains, but that’s only really proof-of-work. With Bitcoin, you’re talking about an extreme carbon footprint of 300 kilograms per transaction. I haven’t done the math on Ripple, but it’s gonna be closer to a Visa transaction, which is 0.4 grams per transaction.”

Nonetheless, this is a step in the right direction for a relatively young industry that could become one of the first to be carbon-neutral. In the same way that large corporates use certificates to decarbonize complex supply chains, blockchain users can purchase certificates from different places worldwide (EW Zero also uses a blockchain system to track and account for these certificates).

XRP was specifically chosen to power RippleNet’s On-Demand Liquidity (ODL) service for the immutable green aspects and its payment scalability. Independent researchers suggest that XRP transactions could grow by more than 1000% by 2025; this has massive implications for energy savings and the carbon footprint reduction of blockchain-driven finance.

Ripple states:

“That is why we’re helping to launch the EW Zero open-source tool that enables any blockchain, not just the XRP Ledger, to decarbonize through the purchase of renewable energy in local markets in partnership with Energy Web Foundation. We’ve also committed substantial funding to the XRP Ledger Foundation to support their efforts to engage developers in ensuring the XRP Ledger remains a leader in sustainability.”

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