Last year, the cryptocurrency industry became mainstream, and its underlying problems are also in the limelight.
The most frequently cited are the high energies consumed by the oldest and most popular blockchains, including: Bitcoin When Ethereum, Because it uses a proof of work consensus mechanism.
Sustainability or security?
These problems were exacerbated this year, when Ethereum usage surged with the rise of the DeFi and NFT sectors. In fact, there was traffic that the network might not be ready to handle.
recently Blog post, Platform
“Ethereum’s current energy consumption is too high and unsustainable. Resolving energy consumption concerns without sacrificing security and decentralization is an important technical challenge.”
In the midst of a serious backlash, Ethereum is now moving towards a more environmentally friendly ecosystem, moving to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism that uses significantly less energy than PoW.
The need for high computational power becomes meaningless as it eliminates the need for miners and replaces them with validators that use their own ETH as a form of trust.
Some rival blockchains including Polka dot, Cardano, When Avanalke Since we have already adopted this mechanism, we have recorded much lower transaction fees and times.
Ethereum’s PoS-based beacon chain has been in operation since the end of 2020 and the network will be fully adopted by the second quarter of 2022. Meanwhile, the chain provided Ethereum with scalable and energy-efficient insights after the network merged.
The road from PoW to PoS is ahead
In addition, according to the blog post mentioned above, integration into PoS could reduce total energy consumption by 99.95%, a mechanism that is 2000 times more efficient than PoW.
“Ethereum’s energy consumption is about the same as running a home computer on each node on the network.”
By comparison, ETH transactions on PoW correspond to the average US household power consumption for 7.44 days. Report by Digiconomist..
The post also suggested a “realistic estimate” of sharded Ethereum transactions after merging using rollups. This was 25,000-100,000 transactions (tps) per second. This means that the network takes about 4 seconds to complete 100,000 transactions and uses about 0.667kWh of energy.
“This is about 0.4% less energy used by Visa in the same number of transactions, or about 225 times less energy than Ethereum’s current Proof of Work network.”
Interestingly, a single ETH transaction Currently in use As much energy as a 100,000 VISA transaction.
It is impossible to predict what the future will look like in terms of ESG goals for the merged network, but the beacon chain is causing problems in different lanes.
Recent Twitter users Highlighting The chain contract is the single largest Ethereum contract, including 8641,954 Ethereum, worth more than $ 34 billion at the time of press. It is reportedly not “send or use”.
Breaking News: 8641,954 ETH ($ 32 billion) is trapped in a single largest Ethereum contract and cannot be sent or used. You will need a hard fork that has not yet been written or specified. The timing and conditions of the hard fork are still unknown.https://t.co/xcXPwbS93v
— Tomer Strolight | Stirring for Bitcoin Art (@TomerStrolight) December 14, 2021
Even if the network needs an unspecified hard fork to bail out funds, the huge amount of ETH already bet shows high demand and confidence in the integration of ETH 2.0.
