"Green NFTs: A Study on the Environmental Impact of Cryptoart Technologies" is a paper written by Samuele Marro and Luca Donno, with the help of Giuseppe Pignataro (Professor of Microeconomics and Political Economy at University of Bologna). It analyzes the impact of both individual transactions and the Ethereum blockchain as a whole. It also describes several solutions to help cryptoartists reduce their emissions. While our model is designed with cryptoart in mind, it can be easily applied to other areas, such as decentralized finance and games.
You can find our paper here.
Remember to check out the paper's companion website, Green NFT Helper.
The most important conclusions of our paper are:
- The impact of a transaction does not depend only on the gas used, but is instead proportional to the transaction fee;
- Spending 1 dollar on transaction fees on Ethereum is equivalent to emitting at least 1.151 kgCO2eq;
- A blockchain with full blocks pollutes more than one with empty blocks;
- The single most effective action that a user can take to reduce their own impact is to pay a reasonably lower gas price;
- Variations in the price of Ether influence the greenhouse gas emissions of the Ethereum network;
- As of early May 2021, Ethereum emits 24.76 MtCO2eq per year;
- EIP-1559 is expected to reduce global Ethereum emissions by about a third;
- Using Layer 2 technologies significantly reduces the impact of transactions;
- Transitioning to Proof of Stake remains the best long-term solution for Ethereum.
After publication, we noticed that in sections 1 (Introduction) and 9 (Key Takeaways) we used an incorrect value of alpha_tot (1.115) instead of the correct one (1.151) computed in section 5 (Estimating alpha_tot). This mistake has been corrected in the latest version. Since all other figures were computed using the correct value, no further corrections were necessary.