The network also pledged $20 million to offset its carbon footprint and develop an industry-wide movement.
The Polygon Network on Tuesday announced its ambition to go carbon neutral and carbon positive this year by releasing its Green Manifesto: A Smart Contract with Planet Earth. They also committed $20 million to offset their carbon footprint and buy additional credits to eventually go carbon negative.
Part of the Ethereum scaling solution plan for a more sustainable future involves providing resources to ecosystem partners who also want to offset their carbon footprint. In addition, they hope to help NGOs raise funds to fight climate change.
According to the company, the Green Manifesto places freedom “at the heart of the Web3 ethos” and climate change as the greatest threat to that freedom. Going carbon neutral means that every issued non-fungible token (NFT), token-linked or decentralized finance exchange (DeFi) transacted on Polygon will be counted and its environmental impact offset. Their long-term vision is for the ecosystem to be the first blockchain they believe will be climate positive.
Polygon has partnered with KlimaDAO, a developer organization offering grid carbon offset technology, and Offsetra, which provides Polygon with an analysis tool that measures grid carbon intensity. By analyzing emissions from staking node hardware or bridge activities, as well as energy consumption from interacting with the main Ethereum network, a management strategy can be better developed.
Polygon also released an issuance analysis that showed that 99% of Polygon’s issuances are related to checkpoint and bridging activities involving transactions on the Ethereum mainnet. Polygon reported total network emissions of 90,645 tons CO2e from February 2021 to February 2022 from companies such as Microsoft and Deloitte.
Polygon recently raised $450 million in a funding round led by Sequoia and other major blockchain venture capital funds to expand its scaling solutions, which include Polygon PoS, Polygon Edge, and Polygon Avail. These scalability and resiliency initiatives are part of their overall strategy to support mass adoption of Web3 applications, said Sandeep Neywal, Polygon co-founder.
