On Tuesday, Polygon announced its commitment to being carbon-neutral and climate-positive this year with the release of the “Green Manifesto: A Smart Contract with Planet Earth.” They also pledged $20 million to offset their carbon footprint and purchase additional credit to eventually become carbon negative.
Part of the plan to expand Ethereum solutions for a more sustainable future includes providing resources to ecosystem partners who also want to offset their carbon footprint. In addition, they hope to help volunteer organizations make donations to fight climate change.
According to the company, the Green Manifesto places freedom “at the heart of the spirit of Web3” and climate change as the biggest threat to that freedom. Going carbon neutral means that every non-fungible (NFT), embossed, token-backed or DeFi token (DeFi) traded on Polygon will be counted and its environmental impact will be offset. Their long term vision is for the ecosystem to become the first blockchain they call climate positive.
Polygon has partnered with KlimaDAO, a developer organization that provides grid carbon offset technology, and Offsetra, which provides Polygon with an analysis tool that measures grid carbon density. By analyzing emissions from node devices or bridge activities, as well as energy consumption when interacting with the main Ethereum network, they can form a better governance strategy.
Polygon also published an emissions analysis that shows that 99% of Polygon’s emissions are due to control and bridging activities that involve transactions on the Ethereum mainnet. Polygon reported that the network’s total emissions of 90,645 tons of CO2 from February 2021 to February 2022 come from companies such as Microsoft and Deloitte.
Polygon recently raised $450 million in funding rounds 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 his overall strategy to drive widespread adoption of Web3 applications, said Polygon co-founder Sandeep Neywal.
