Solana launches emissions dashboard to encourage carbon footprint transparency in blockchain

The Solana Foundation, in partnership with the data platform Trycarbonara, announced the launch of a real-time tracking dashboard to measure carbon emissions on the Solana blockchain.

According to a blog post by the foundation, this represents the first “major smart-contract blockchain” to measure carbon emissions in real time. The organization hopes this will stimulate a trend towards transparency about carbon emissions in the blockchain ecosystem:

“The Solana Foundation hopes to set a new standard for emissions measurement in blockchain by publishing this data.”

The new dashboard can be found on the Solana Climate website. Trackers there currently show total number of nodes, megawatt-hours, average and marginal usage of total carbon emissions, and a variety of other indicators.

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The new dashboard also includes several emissions comparison charts where users can see side-by-side conversions showing Solana use versus a variety of other emissions-producing activities.

Burning a gallon of gasoline, according to the chart, produces the equivalent of performing 140,416.67 transactions on the Solana blockchain, while performing a Google search yields up to one and a quarter transactions.

The data used to power the Solana Foundation’s real-time carbon emissions dashboard is available open source and is based on the estimated carbon footprint of the Dell PowerEdge R940.

Whether other blockchain outfits will adopt similar tracking systems remains to be seen, but this move by the Solana Foundation comes amid growing global efforts to use blockchain technology to monitor carbon emissions around the world.

As part of the “Shaping Europe’s digital future” initiative, the European Commission, a politically independent arm of the EU’s executive power that operates alongside the European Council, has hailed blockchain’s ability to serve as a basis for accurately measuring carbon emissions in any sector.

In an article on the EU’s digital strategy blog, the commission wrote, “blockchain can be used through smart contracts to better calculate, track and report on the reduction of the carbon footprint across the value chain.”

Meanwhile, in the United States, President Joe Biden recently unveiled budget plans that would add a 30% tax on electricity used for cryptocurrency mining.