Most Eco Friendly Crypto Coins

While Bitcoin pioneered the era of financial independence, giving us the foundation of a decentralized way to make money, it soon became the primary concern for environmental reasons. It consumes an estimated 150 terawatt hours of electricity annually, making many wary about investing in this cryptocurrency. Fortunately, more devs are now embracing eco friendly crypto coins.

This guide discusses the most eco friendly cryptos that are energy efficient, have a minimal carbon footprint, and even convert the biggest crypto skeptics.

Top Eco Friendly Crypto List 2024

A Closer Look at Environmentally Friendly Crypto Projects

In this section, we look closely at the most sustainable cryptos of 2024. Some are available on eToro, one of the most reliable crypto trading platforms, and have listed many eco-friendly crypto assets, and others are presales able to be purchased via the project’s website.

Solana: A High Performance and Low Impact Crypto

Solana is a 4^th generation blockchain that came up to deal with the weaknesses of Ethereum. When Ethereum launched as the first altcoin, it had an exclusive air around it, but it also had many scalability issues – partly because of the proof of work mechanism. It increased the transaction fees proportional to the congestion of the network. Solana, however, owing to its architecture, can handle nearly 65,000 transactions per second, and that too at a low fee.

But the greatest achievement Solana obtained in the context of being environmentally friendly was in 2021, when Solana Foundation made the entire network carbon neutral. Solana’s main philosophy is to create a small, fast and efficient blockchain. To achieve this, It works on the Proof of History Consensus. Due to this, one Solana transaction takes up only 2707 Joules of energy – far lower than one Bitcoin transaction that consumes 7.4 billion joules.

The Solana Foundation focuses on minimizing Solana’s energy impact through constant innovations. In 2021, Solana became carbon neutral using Watershed Climate. Furthermore, the Solana foundation is also funding refrigerant destruction, which, according to Green America, is one of the best solutions to reverse climate change.

Due to these factors, Solana is one of the most energy-conscious cryptos on the planet. Its emergence has led to the rise of many energy-efficient Dapps and Solana NFTs that deliver the best of crypto in an environmentally conscious manner.

That said, things haven’t been on the up and up for this crypto in 2024. In addition to taking a massive blow due to the crypto winter, Solana has been a victim of several high-profile hacks. That said, the devs are constantly working to make Solana more secure and increase its uptime.

After opening 2022 at $173, the value of Solana has retraced as low as $8 due to FTX collapse and crypto winter.

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Hedera Hashgraph: A Utility-Crypto with Carbon Negative Philosophy

When we ask which crypto is eco friendly, our focus automatically veers towards crypto assets that use the Proof of Stake consensus protocol. Among them, too, however, there is one crypto that UCL has named the greenest among every PoS coin. It is the Hedera Hashgraph and only consumes 0.020-watt hour per transaction.

But this crypto is unique because it is not built atop of blockchain – but a distributed ledger known as the Hashgraph. It is a new technology designed to address the blockchain issues of transaction costs, speed, efficiency, and scalability.

The native crypto of the Hedera Hashgraph ecosystem, HBAR, forms a protective layer around the decentralized application on the network to secure them from malicious attacks. It also plays a critical role in services on the network, including NFT generation, smart contracts to build dApps, and a consensus service.

In addition to embracing low energy consumption, Hedera Hashgraph also decided to go carbon negative in 2021. To achieve this, the foundation overseeing this network chose to offset the network’s energy consumption by buying green e-climate certified credits.

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Algorand: A Crypto collaborating with ClimateTrade

Algorand is another crypto to have embraced an eco friendly approach in 2021. It partnered with ClimateTrade, an organization known for assisting other companies to go carbon neutral. So far, this institute has helped 300 companies embrace carbon neutrality – helping offset three million metric tonnes of carbon.

Algorand is the “blockchain of FutureFi” and is said to be the world’s most powerful and sustainable blockchain. The institute has successfully achieved decentralization. It is one of the most secure and scalable blockchains, achieving these qualities by being more sustainable.

To achieve carbon neutrality, Algorand uses a special sustainability oracle. It notarizes the carbon footprint at regular intervals and then keeps the protocol running in a carbon-negative manner.

According to the official website, Algorand was designed to be environmentally sustainable and focuses on ensuring that the crypto crowd enjoys the blockchain offerings without harming the environment. And once Elon musk declared that he would “most likely” accept Bitcoin again if it goes eco friendly, Algorand came forward to offer more sustainable solutions to modern payments on Twitter.

We are proud that @Algorand is carbon negative and offsets the very small environmental impact with wind, reforestation, and peatland sustainability projects around the globe. @Tesla could embrace sustainable, modern payment infrastructure w/ #stablecoins on Algorand. Let’s chat!

— Algorand Technologies (@Algorand) May 12, 2021

If you’re looking to buy Algorand, now may be the right for it because ever since entering the crypto winter, Algorand has been accumulating around $0.30.

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Polkadot: Cryptocurrency with the Lowest Carbon footprint

Polkadot, according to the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute (CCRI), is the lowest carbon footprint crypto asset in the market, with far lower emissions than the likes of Avalanche, Algorand, Tezos, and Solana.

When pitted against other cryptos in terms of energy consumption, Polkadot only goes as far as taking 70,237 Kwh/year.

Polkadot pioneered the idea of interoperability between the blo

ckchains. That is, introducing a process of transferring a crypto asset from one blockchain to another and vice versa. Essentially, it aimed to establish an inclusive ecosystem that allows different chains to communicate. The platform also gives users staking opportunities to earn a passive income. Users can lock their crypto assets and earn interest. Delegator-level staking will reward with nearly 14% APY. But active users who want to run validator nodes can earn up to a 15% APY at the time of writing.

Due to this factor, Polkadot (DOT) quickly started gaining steam after entering the market. After trading sideways for a month, the DOT price saw a massive increase to beyond $45 before retrace. But it got back on the uptrend track and went to its all-time high of $53 during the crypto boom of November 2021.

And at the time of writing, Polkadot is trading at $7.36. It is a good opportunity to buy as there are many innovations.

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Tezos: Focusing on Energy Efficient Proof of Stake Blockchain

Launched in 2018, Tezos is one of the first Proof-of-stake blockchains to enter the ecosystem. It has always been environmentally friendly crypto from the get-go.

An interesting fact about this crypto is that it didn’t have to resort to any hard forks or upgrades to become more eco friendly. And over time, its energy efficiency has only increased. We researched and found that the energy efficiency of Tezos increased by 30% from 2020 to 2021.

Tezos is a versatile crypto, allowing users to participate in DeFi (Decentralized Finance) and Dapps (Decentralized applications). The ecosystem has also made room for NFTs – but in an eco friendly manner since their high energy consumption has always come under criticism by major publications and experts. Because of its environmentally conscious approach towards NFTs, Rarible recently partnered with Tezos.

That said, the crypto bear market has still affected Tezos significantly. At the time of writing, Tezos has been trading at an 82% lower value than its all-time high. That said, the 10^th Tezos update is live, in addition to the NFT game called Chainborn, which will likely pump the price of this crypto in days to come.

NFT Battle Game Chainborn Is Live On Tezos Mainnet https://t.co/jNA7I7bA77 #Tezos #NFT #blockchaingames #BlockchainGaming #NFTBattle #Ottez #BitBirds #Vessel #BatBits @chainborngame

— XTZ News (@XTZNews) August 22, 2022

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Near Protocol: Awarded the Climate Neutral Product Label in 2021

Near Protocol has always been bullish about being climate conscious. In fact, it has recently been certified by South Pole, a digital climate solutions consultancy term. The firm has assessed the direct and indirect emissions of the project after the introduction of the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Standard.

The assessment covered everything from heating, cooling, electricity use, and purchasing electronic services and products that impact the environment.

However, it is not only the architecture and eco friendly business practices that landed Near Protocol on this list. It is the offset measures that it has taken. The foundation overseeing the protocol decided to plant trees to offset their carbon emissions. Going even further, Near has developed Mintbase.io, an NFT platform that uses part of the proceeds generated from the NFT trade for CO2 offsetting projects in other countries. If you’re interested, you can buy Near on Binance.

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Cardano: A Crypto collaborating with the reforestation campaign

Following the approach of the Near Protocol, another crypto to have pledged to plant more trees is Cardano. Cardano is another pure proof-of-stake crypto that is 37,500 times more efficient than Bitcoin.

Furthermore, Cardano (ADA) is one of the biggest crypto assets when it comes to market capitalization, with over $15 billion market cap at the time of writing. Many experts believe that Cardano was the pioneer to have made way for cryptocurrencies to become more eco friendly.

In September 2021, Cardano opened the first Global Cardano Impact Challenge and invited users to invest in ADA and donate it to Veritree. For every ADA donated, the Cardano foundation pledged to plant one tree.

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How To Tell Which Crypto is Eco Friendly

Here are the tips to know for choosing an environmentally friendly crypto:

Project’s CO2 Emissions

Ever since Bitcoin’s proof of work started to draw criticism, altcoins devs started revealing their carbon emissions on the white paper. Check them out and learn what these devs are doing to offset those emissions.

Proof of Work or Proof of Stake

Proof of Stake cryptocurrencies are far more energy efficient crypto assets. For instance, Ethereum’s existing Proof of Work continually consumes 5.13 Gigawatt, whereas a Proof of Stake system consumes 99.95% less power than that. Same with Tezos – it continually draws only 7 kilowatts.

Mining

Crypto mining has always been a concern of environmentalists. That said, it is how blockchain started, and some eco friendly crypto mining solutions have started to emerge. An example of this is Zenotta, a layer 1 solution to make bitcoin mining greener.

NFTs

There are many NFTs that are powered by eco friendly cryptos. And there are also other popular NFTs like Souls of Nature that are using the metaverse to bring awareness about environmental problems. The project aims to protect endangered species. It aims to offset the ecological impact of NFTs.

Green Blockchains

Blockchain systems, by their decentralized nature, can increase the deployment of renewable energy and can promote eco friendly supply chain practices. However, only a few are trying to bring real-world use cases through that technology, and Cardano and Near protocol are those few among the list trying to achieve it.

Here is a table highlighting the crypto emissions of various cryptos and general industries

The Verdict

The rise of environmental concerns across the world has led to the emergence of many eco friendly cryptos. Other than the ones we have listed, PowerLedger (POWR), Avalanche (AVAX), and FLOW are some of the most ecologically friendly cryptocurrencies in the market.

FAQs on Environmentally Friendly Cryptos