Solana creates blockchain emissions dashboard

The Solana Foundation, in collaboration with data platform Trycarbonara, has announced the launch of a dashboard for measuring carbon emissions on the Solana blockchain.

This is the first “major smart-contract blockchain” to measure carbon emissions in real-time, according to a blog post from the foundation.

The organization anticipates that this will stimulate a trend toward carbon emissions transparency in the blockchain ecosystem.

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

The new dashboard can be accessed on the website for Solana Climate. There are presently trackers displaying the total number of nodes, megawatt-hours, average and marginal total carbon emissions, and numerous other indicators.

According to the graph, burning a gallon of petroleum is equivalent to conducting 140,416.67 transactions on the Solana blockchain, whereas undertaking a Google search adds up to 0.25 transactions.

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

It remains to be seen whether other blockchain organizations will implement similar monitoring systems, but this move by the Solana Foundation coincides with increasing global efforts to use blockchain technology to monitor carbon emissions worldwide.

As part of its “Shaping Europe’s Digital Future” initiative, the European Commission, a politically independent branch of the EU’s executive that works in tandem with the European Council, has praised blockchain’s capacity to serve as a foundation for the accurate measurement of carbon emissions in any industry.

In an article published on the EU’s digital strategy blog, the commission stated: “Blockchain can be utilized via smart contracts to more accurately calculate, track, and report on the reduction of the carbon footprint across the entire value chain.”

President Joe Biden of the United States recently proposed budget plans that would impose a 30% tax on electricity used for cryptocurrency mining.