CUT is on a journey to reduce the carbon footprint of its technology stack. Since the beginning of the project, we have tracked, measured and offset CUT’s contribution to ethereum mainnet carbon footprint. In 2022, Ethereum 2.0 will be released which will replace the Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism with a Proof of Stake strategy. This will remove the need for power hungry miners, and instead will rely on validators who will stake eth as collateral to secure the network. Ethereum 2.0 is expected to reduce the entire network’s energy consumption by 99.95% in just a few months after launch.
While CUT’s carbon footprint will benefit from the move to Ethereum 2.0, it is important to note that CUT relies on other infrastructure and applications in order to work. One example is the Retire Bot. The Retire Bot is an application that monitors Ethereum Mainnet for CUT user’s intent to retire CUT from circulation. When a user signals their intent to retire from the Retire App, the Bot ties their CUT tokens to specific, tangible, and owned project carbon offset assets from a project pool and then removes them from circulation - never to be sold, traded or retired again. This is a fundamental component of CUT’s minting process and functionality as a “Utility Token”
In the beginning we hosted the Retire Bot on generic x86 hardware that provided us with the performance and scalability we needed to serve the network. But because x86 servers are more performance oriented, they are not optimized for power efficiency. As we are on a mission to constantly look for ways to improve our power efficiency, we turned to Meridian DLT, a climate tech company that operates a renewable energy powered green data network.
Meridian DLT’s green data network is powered by ultra scalable nodes that are designed from the ground up with power efficiency in mind. These “nano” servers leverage an ARM-based architecture, an alternative to x86 that requires much less power to run workloads. For this reason, ARM CPUs are often found in smartphones as the power efficiency lends itself to long battery life.
- High level Architecture Diagram
- We continue to work with new projects around the world in pursuing their carbon economy goals.
