Perspectives on powering Climate Action via NFTs—key insights from our CEO Alexander Mitrovich at COP27
#LeaveNoOneBehind

Our CEO, Alexander Mitrovich, was recently interviewed by Jillian Godsil, during which Alexander touched on several core tenants of NFT and climate change he believes will play a significant role as we surge toward climate-friendly digital technology innovation. Click here for the full interview.

Alexander’s words inspired us to create an in-depth, personal collection of thoughts, supporting his views and expanding on why his words hold so much credence. Through recent analysis and Unique Network’s NFT architecture, we boldly make our case for supporting climate action via NFTs.  

The full leadership paper can be enjoyed here.

Unique Network at COP27

During November 6 – 18, Unique Network, IAAI GloCha, Un-Habitat, and Climate Chain Coalition will be in Egypt for the COP27 UN Climate Summit, working with world leaders to come up with solutions to tackle climate change.

Unique Network is one of the booths at COP27 exclusively invited to lead the blockchains' role at the event's Digital Innovation and DigitalARt4Climate pavilion.

Climate Chain Coalition is a multi-stakeholder partnership to mobilize resources for climate empowerment by transforming art into NFTs, thus opening up a socio-technological innovation space.

NFTs Effects

Much of the research and mathematical calculations underpinning many of the key information in the paper were performed by Unique Network CTO, Greg Zaitsev. 

Although the crypto art craze is new, even NFT creators admit there are significant greenhouse gas emissions linked to NFTs. Most of which can be attributed to transactions on token marketplaces using Ethereum.

While NFTs are still a relatively small portion of all Ethereum transactions — research findings indicate that in carbon emissions, Ethereum 2.0 still ranks last compared to other proof-of-stake networks such as Polkadot and Tezos — emitting an estimated ~45g of CO2 per mint. Polkadot was the most climate-friendly chain, with a mere 0.05g emitted per NFT mint.

As a Polkadot parachain, Unique Network can utilize only a portion of all Polkadot validators simultaneously, which further minimizes energy consumption and carbon emissions, resulting in just 0.0192g of CO2 emitted per NFT mint (over 60% less consumption than Polkadot).

‘Powering Climate Action via NFTs’ is the first thought leadership paper Unique Network has released, one with the hope of inspiring concrete change in the ongoing mission for greener and environmentally friendly blockchain solutions with NFTs at the core. 

Still haven’t read the paper?

Click here to access the document.

About Unique Network

Unique Network is an infrastructure for the next generation of NFTs. The first NFT chain for Kusama and Polkadot, Unique Network offers developers independence from high network transaction fees, dense upgrades, and siloed NFTs. The Unique Network team has partnered with numerous NFT projects in order to deepen the integrations needed to expand NFT use cases and usability, like  DigitalArt4Climate-A UN Habitat and IAAI Glocha Initiative, Lemonade Social, OG Protocol’s Dynamic NFTs, Art Curator Grid, XP Network, and SupraOracles.