Sustainability
Sustainable blockchain technology driving real climate action.
Chia designed a more sustainable blockchain, offering globally-inclusive access to those farming—Chia blockchain’s version of mining—and to the broader financial system. We’re powering enterprise and multilateral efforts to drive investment in sustainability, leveraging the strengths of our inherently low power and reusable resource-based consensus mechanism. Contact our team at info@chia.net to learn more.
PoST consensus: green like PoS, secure like PoW
We leveraged learnings from the early entrants into the blockchain and cryptocurrency space to invent a new consensus mechanism, Proof of Space Time (PoST), which utilizes hard drives and storage rather than single-use, power-hungry compute hardware. PoST reduces the ecological impact of blockchain technology while enabling a secure consensus mechanism that does not rely on the constant processing power demanded by validators (the primary example being Proof of Work, e.g. Bitcoin).
Chia’s real-world use cases
We’re deploying our sustainable technology to create novel use cases for projects and organizations enabling democratized access to the financial system, and driving positive outcomes for nature.
Building the Infrastructure for Credible Climate Finance
Chia was selected to provide a first-of-its-kind public blockchain solution for the World Bank’s Climate Warehouse. The prototype will facilitate transparent sharing and reporting of government climate project information and carbon credit issuances on the Climate Warehouse, effectively a climate project information analog to the SEC’s EDGAR.
Enhancing the Carbon Market
The World Bank’s International Finance Corporation, Chia, Cultivo, and Aspiration announced a partnership to raise private capital for an innovative model to source, tokenize and sell high-quality, verified carbon credits. Focused on enabling cross-border, cross-market direct investment in high-quality valid carbon mitigation projects, the platform brings unique transparency, integrity, and traceability to the voluntary carbon market by connecting the sourcing, analysis, tracking in the registry, tokenization, and sale of high-quality nature-based carbon credits.
Improving Country Climate Registries
We announced an agreement with the government of Costa Rica to develop an open-source software platform that will be shared freely with other nations to improve the management of their climate inventory and operate national registries to manage carbon inventory, climate registry and record bilateral corresponding adjustments with trades occurring to shift credits among countries.
Creating a Sustainable, Circular Economy for Storage
Chia partnered with William McDonough, Seagate, and Western Digital to launch the Circular Drive Initiative to enable secure second-use for drives and reduce e-waste – optimizing the supply and value chain, and driving a sustainable, circular economy for storage reuse.
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Chia’s sustainable technology
Power Consumption
We built an entirely novel consensus mechanism, PoST, to address the energy challenges presented by the industry – while simultaneously maintaining the highest degree of network security. With Chia, the majority of the work is done upfront and only once in a process called Plotting. The computing power used by plotting is very small, accounting for less than 1% of the total energy cost over a five year TCO model.
The ongoing power demand is minor compared to Proof-of-Work, using only the energy required to maintain a hard drive idling 99.75% of the time (Source: Western Digital, Seagate, Chia). Power usage of the entire Chia network of farmers is estimated to less than 1% of the power used by Bitcoin (chiapower.org), and each transaction on the Chia blockchain has a footprint 0.01% compared to Bitcoin – with the growing adoption of SSDs reducing power consumption further.
Circularity
Circular business models are critical in achieving a sustainable future, eliminating waste, and keeping materials in use at high value across multiple cycles and long periods of time. Chia farming is an extremely light workload, optimized for used storage and will drive circular business models for hard drives, reducing e-waste, greenhouse gas emissions, and returning failed drives to the manufacturer for full component and rare earth material recovery.
Underutilized Commodity
Storage capacity is a widely available, highly scalable, and underutilized commodity. We believe that the nature of competitive farming markets will lead to a large amount of the Chia Netspace on underutilized and reused (circular) hardware.
One third of all the storage on earth (9.4 zettabytes in 2022) is underutilized and not storing user data (IDC Worldwide Global StorageSphere Forecast). Consumers, on average, only use 25% of their external storage devices (ex. USB, backup) and desktop storage. Chia takes advantage of this underutilized storage space to secure the network at a marginal cost to consumers and enterprises as they already own the storage assets.