Polygon Is Committed To Go Carbon Neutral Within This Year
The Polygon network announced a commitment to go carbon neutral and climate positive within this year. They have released a “Green Manifesto: A Smart Contract with Planet Earth,” and have pledged $20M to offset their carbon footprints.
Polygon’s plan for a more sustainable future includes providing resources for ecosystem partners who also want to offset their carbon footprint. They also wish to facilitate with NGOs to make donations for the cause of fighting climate change.
The company’s Green Manifesto places freedom “at the center of the Web3 ethos” and climate change as the biggest threat to that. Going carbon neutral means that every NFT minted, token bridged or DeFi trade made on Polygon will be accounted for and its environmental impact is offset. In the long term Polygon has a vision for the ecosystem to become the first blockchain to be what they call climate positive.
The company is working with KlimaDAO, an organization of developers that provides on-chain carbon offsetting technology as well as Offsetra that provides Polygon with an analysis tool that gauges the network’s carbon intensity. By analyzing emissions from staking node hardware or bridging activities and the energy consumption from interacting with Ethereum Mainnet, the can better form a management strategy.
According to an emissions analysis, 99% of Polygon’s emissions are due to checkpointing and bridging activities that involve transactions on Ethereum Mainnet. The company cited a total network emissions of 90,645 tonnes CO2e from February 2021 – February 2022, under companies like Microsoft and Deloitte.
In February this year, Polygon raised $450 million in a Sequoia-led funding round and other big blockchain venture funds in order to expand its scaling solutions, which includes Polygon PoS, Polygon Edge and Polygon Avail. According to Polygon’s co-founder Sandeep Nailwal, these scalability and sustainability initiatives are part of their overall strategy to foster mainstream adoption of Web3 applications.
