Polygon Networks announced its commitment to going carbon neutral and climate positive this year by releasing its “Green Manifesto: A Smart Contract with Planet Earth” on Tuesday. They also pledged $20 million to offset their carbon footprints, and purchased additional credits to eventually become carbon negative.
Green Manifesto unveiled – a smart contract with Planet Earth! https://t.co/p9DFtUG9XP [1/2] pic.twitter.com/Xgn8jubffa
– Polygon (@0xPolygon) April 12, 2022
Part of the Ethereum scaling solution’s plan for a more sustainable future includes providing resources for ecosystem partners who want to offset their carbon footprint. Additionally, they hope to facilitate NGOs to make donations that go towards fighting climate change.
According to the company, the Green Manifesto places freedom “at the heart of the Web3 ethos” and climate change is the biggest threat to that freedom. Being carbon neutral means that every NFT mining, token bridge or DeFi trade done on Polygon will be accounted for and offset by its environmental impact. His long-term vision is to become the first blockchain for the ecosystem he calls climate positive.
Polygon is collaborating with KlimaDAO, a conglomerate of developers that provides on-chain carbon offsetting technology, as well as Offsetra which provides Polygon with an analysis tool that measures the carbon intensity of the network. Staking nodes can create better management strategies, by analyzing emissions from hardware or bridging activities and energy consumption from interactions with the Ethereum mainnet.
Polygon also published an emissions analysis which found that 99% of Polygon’s emissions are due to checkpointing and bridging activities involving transactions on the Ethereum mainnet. Under companies such as Microsoft and Deloitte, it cited total network emissions of 90,645 tonnes of CO2e from February 2021 to February 2022.
Polygon recently raised $450 million in a Sequoia-led funding round and other large blockchain venture funds to expand its scaling solutions, including Polygon POS, Polygon Edge and Polygon Avail. According to Sandeep Nelwal, Co-Founder of Polygon, these scalability and sustainability initiatives are part of their overall strategy to promote mainstream adoption of Web3 applications.
