Cardano uses 10,000x less electricity than Bitcoin

Graphics by @heavymetaltcryp (Twitter)

We have been doing numbers before, important numbers like an initial Cardano Stake Pool Carbon Footprint for us and for the Cardano Stake Pools in general, and we will continue to do more numbers to get a better idea on our impact.

One important number to take into account when thinking about the climate impact of internet based technologies, such as blockchains, is the electricity consumption. We all know that Bitcoin is using a lot of energy, but really how much is often unclear.

However, if you look at some research and put it in perspective the picture becomes clearer.

We compared Cardano electricity consumption versus Bitcoin and found…

Cardano is currently about 10,000x more energy efficient than Bitcoin.

Below are the calculations in an excel spread sheet, but we thought we also make a little YouTube video to talk everybody through.

A kettle analogue to help visualisation of the amounts of electricity used

Cardano: The energy consumption for one transaction on Cardano is equivalent to boiling a kettle for about 3.6min.

Bitcoin: The energy consumption for one transaction on Bitcoin is equivalent to boiling a kettle for 23 days.

Sources:

  1. The Cardano Energy consumption: https://www.climateneutralcardano.org/offset-calculation/
  2. The Bitcoin Energy consumption: https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index
  3. Energy consumption range per transaction: http://blockchain.cs.ucl.ac.uk/blockchain-energy-consumption/

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