As the cryptocurrency industry becomes mainstream this year, the fundamental issues associated with it will also be discussed more intensely.

One of the most cited is that the oldest and most popular blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum use “huge” amounts of electricity because they use the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism.

Sustainability or security?

These issues are particularly acute this year as the DeFi and NFT sectors fueled the surge in Ethereum usage. In fact, it brings in so much traffic that the network can’t handle it.

In one post In a recent blog, the platform noted:

“The current energy consumption of Ethereum is too high and not sustainable. Addressing energy consumption concerns without sacrificing security and decentralization is a significant engineering challenge. ”

Amid the backlash, Ethereum is currently pushing for a greener ecosystem by switching to a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism that uses significantly less energy than PoW.

Since it removes miners and instead marks out the validators ETH as a form of trust, the high computing power is no longer available.

Some competing blockchains like Polkadot, Cardano, Avanalche use this mechanism and therefore have tower fees and much faster transaction times.

Ethereum’s Beacon Chain with PoS has been in place since late 2020 and the network is expected to fully adopt this consensus mechanism by the second quarter of 2022. In the meantime, the chain has given Ethereum insights into the scalability and energy savings of the network after The Merge.

Convert PoW luxurious PoS It’s only a matter of time

In addition, according to the blog post mentioned above, PoS consolidation can reduce total energy consumption by 99.95% and the mechanism is 2000 times more efficient compared to PoW.

“Ethereum’s energy costs will be roughly the same as running a home computer for every node on the network.”

For comparison: an ETH transaction in PoW corresponds to the average electricity consumption of a US household in 7.44 days report by digiconomist.

The article also suggests a “realistic estimate” for a fragmented Ethereum transaction after The Merge with roll-up (scaling solution) that reaches 25,000-100,000 transactions per second (tps). This means that the network takes about 4 seconds to complete 100,000 transactions and uses about 0.667 kWh of energy in the process.

“This equates to 0.4% of the energy Visa uses for the same number of transactions, or a ~ 225 reduction in consumption compared to Ethereum’s current PoW network.”

Interestingly, a single ETH transaction today consumes the same energy as 100,000 VISA transactions.

While it is impossible to accurately gauge the future of the post-merge network in terms of ESG goals, the beacon chain ran into other problems.

A Twitter user recently emphasize The chain’s contract is the largest contract on Ethereum, with 8,641,954 ETH worth over $ 34 billion at press time. According to the report, this number cannot “send or output”.

Even if the network needs a hard fork to free up funds, the large amount of ETH deployed shows high demand and confidence in the consolidation of ETH 2.0.

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