Solana launches emissions dashboard to spur blockchain carbon footprint transparency

The Solana Foundation, in collaboration with data platform Trycarbonara, announced the launch of a real-time tracking dashboard to measure carbon emissions on the Solana blockchain. 

1/ Today, the Solana Foundation is leading the charge in the climate fight by making Solana one of the first blockchains to have its emissions measured in real time, thanks to a new data portal created with TryCarbonara.

Learn more: https://t.co/k4QsZmtjHn pic.twitter.com/gqPwpKtv3u

— Solana (@solana) April 21, 2023

According to a blog post from the foundation, this represents the first “major smart-contract blockchain” to measure carbon emissions in real-time. The organization hopes this will spur a trend towards 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 found on the Solana Climate website. Trackers there currently display the total node count, megawatt-hours, total carbon emissions average and marginal use, and numerous other indicators.

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The new dashboard also contains several emissions comparison charts where users can view side-by-side conversions depicting Solana usage versus numerous other emission-producing activities.

3/ The tracker also includes comparison charts that help put the carbon footprint of the @Solana blockchain and individual interactions with the chain in perspective. pic.twitter.com/sUJlM07YI2

— Solana (@solana) April 21, 2023

Burning a gallon of gasoline, according to the chart, produces the equivalent of conducting 140,416.67 transactions on the Solana blockchain, whereas performing a Google search adds up to one and a quarter transactions.

The data used to power the Solana Foundation’s real-time carbon emissions dashboard is available open source and is modeled on the estimated carbon footprint of the Dell PowerEdge R940.

Whether other blockchain outfits will adopt similar tracking systems remains to be seen, but this move from the Solana Foundation comes amid increasing global efforts to utilize blockchain technology to monitor carbon emissions around the world.

As part of its “Shaping Europe’s digital future” initiative, the European Commission, a politically independent arm of the EU’s executive that operates in tandem with the European Council, has lauded blockchain’s ability to serve as a foundation for the accurate measurement of carbon emissions in any sector.

In an article on the EU’s digital strategy blog, the commission wrote, “blockchain can be utilised through smart contracts to better calculate, track and report on the reduction of the carbon footprint across the entire value chain.”

Meanwhile, in the U.S., President Joe Biden recently floated budget plans that would add an excise on electricity used for cryptocurrency mining in the amount of 30%.