Ethereum scaling project Polygon pledges $20M to mitigate its carbon footprint

Ethereum scaling project Polygon announced "Green Manifesto: A Smart Contract with Planet Earth" initiative with the intention of becoming carbon neutral and climate positive by the end of this year.

The firm has pledged $20 million in an effort to completely mitigate the impact of its carbon-dioxide emissions this year. The company intends to carry out a number of community projects and plans to build a climate offset vertical within the ecosystem.

Recently, there has been criticism around blockchain and the crypto industry for their extensive usage of electricity. Many experts have been prompting companies in the crypto and blockchain industry to put in efforts to use carbon offsets and fund environmental projects.

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In an effort to mitigate carbon emissions, the firm plans to partner with KlimaDAO — a decentralised collective of environmentalists, developers, and entrepreneurs, intending to offer on-chain carbon offsetting technology. They are also offering an analysis tool called Offsetra, which measures the carbon intensity of the network.

As per the report published by Offsetra, checkpointing and bridging activities involving Ethereum Mainnet transactions account for nearly 99 percent of Polygon's emissions. Checkpointing alone has resulted in almost 16,000 tonnes of emissions and bridging has resulted in nearly 74,000 tonnes of emissions. Polygon's total carbon emissions as of February 2022 were 90,654 tonnes.

In addition to this, the Ethereum scaling project also offers resources for ecosystem partners and the firm hopes to make it convenient for non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to make donations to fight climate change. The firm will also be funding projects that use technology to solve or mitigate climate change, all projects produced on the platform, stay committed to environmentally-friendly methods.

The firm's commitment to sustainability comes ahead of Ethereum's switch to proof-of-stake (PoS), which will cut the network's energy consumption by over 99 percent. Once Ethereum switches to PoS, Polygon aims to transcend beyond carbon neutrality to carbon negative status.