Over a week ago, when Elon Musk said that he would no longer be accepting Bitcoins as a payment method for Tesla cars citing environmental concerns, he ignited the debate about the high carbon footprints of the top PoW blockchains. However, the bitcoins are not alone, Ethereum is equally energy-intensive.
While the second biggest coin by market cap has been for long struggling with the growing network congestion which consequently leads to higher gas fees and wait time, the environmental concerns can longer be ignored.
Ethereum is already in a process to make a shift from the conventional PoW consensus mechanism to PoS. It is expected to solve the network’s congestion woes, reduce the gas fees and Ethereum co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, has now claimed that it would reduce the energy consumption by 99 percent.
Ethereum’s network is scheduled to undergo a complete change this year. It is popularly referred to as Ethereum 2.0 and in anticipation the market has been positively pushing Ethereum’s prices. Commenting on the proposed changes Vitalik Buterin said that he is happy that the biggest problems will go away with the new implementations.
“With shard chains, validators only need to store/run data for the shard they’re validating, not the entire network (like what happens today),” he explained.
