NEAR Foundation Signs Up to the Ethereum Climate Platform 

NEAR Foundation is thrilled to announce that it is signed up to the Ethereum Climate Platform. The Foundation has worked on making the NEAR Protocol and open web sustainable from the get-go, and this move is a major demonstration of that continued commitment to Web3 sustainability. 

The announcement also illustrates NEAR Foundation’s efforts at working collaboratively with globally recognized leaders to minimize the environmental impact of Web3 development. 

Ethereum Climate Platform: accelerating climate finance at scale

At COP27, ConsenSys and climate tech firm Allinfra convened and announced the Ethereum Climate Alliance. A group of technology companies, the ECA is aligned around the mission to accelerate decarbonization and scale climate action. It achieves this by deploying best-in-class technology and funding the development of digital environmental assets designed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and deliver positive environmental and social impact well into the future.

Inspired by the Ethereum Merge, ECA is launching the Ethereum Climate Platform (ECP) — an initiative designed to collaboratively build a blockchain-based technology platform that will engage a decentralized community to accelerate climate finance at scale. The ECP is committed to redress and counteract the historical Ethereum-based carbon footprint, dating back to the network’s launch in 2015, as well as to accelerate the launch partners’ own decarbonization strategies.

NEAR as a sustainability model for ECP and beyond

By joining the ECP, NEAR Foundation is making clear its intention to act as a sustainability model to the broader tech and business community.  

The collective includes a still-growing list of prominent stakeholders from the Web3 ecosystems, including Laser Digital (Nomura), Microsoft, Polygon, The Climate Collective, Celo, Aave, Filecoin, and UPC Capital Ventures. Beyond open web ecosystem, the ECP also includes civil society leaders who are committed to mitigating human-driven climate change.

NEAR Foundation’s environmental stewardship is an integral part of its ethos. From inception, NEAR has focused on a computational alternative to PoW. 

In this system, known as Proof-of-Stake (PoS), there are no miners. Instead, validators stake a given token amount to allow themselves to take part. PoS blockchains incentivize communities to own and control the network. Only then can they validate blocks and collect a block award. Functionally, NEAR’s PoS, called Nightshade, allows the platform to realize its ambition of being simple, scalable, and secure. 

NEAR sustainability a cornerstone to mass Web3 adoption

From the outset, NEAR Foundation has been dedicated to bringing a billion users into a more open web, said NEAR Foundation CEO, Marieke Flament. 

“We recognised early on that sustainability would be a cornerstone of our approach to facilitating the widespread adoption of Web3 technologies,” Flament added. “By aligning with the Ethereum Climate Platform and implementing our Blockchain Operating System (BOS), we’re not just enhancing the user experience — we’re creating a paradigm shift in the blockchain industry that respects and supports our global environment.”

On a social and ecological level, NEAR’s Nightshade sharding approach allows NEAR Foundation to deliver on its carbon-neutral commitment. In 2021, NEAR Protocol was awarded the Climate Neutral Product Label, and its developers have been leading the charge in this era of extraordinary energy efficiency, creating an infrastructure that is lightning-fast, remarkably secure, and capable of accommodating millions of Web3 users.

NEAR Protocol achieved this after enlisting South Pole, a globally recognized climate solutions provider based in Zurich, Switzerland, to evaluate NEAR’s carbon footprint, find ways to reduce it, and counterbalance the remaining emissions with CO2 offsetting initiatives. The assessment revealed that NEAR Protocol was over 200,000 times more carbon efficient than Bitcoin, primarily due to the adoption of PoS over PoW.

Reforestation projects offset the minimal environmental impact of NEAR, rendering the NEAR Blockchain carbon neutral. Performing transactions on NEAR contributes to tree-planting initiatives in Colombia, Zimbabwe, and the United States via these carbon-offsetting projects.

“Having NEAR Foundation onboard this endeavor strengthens our joint mission significantly,” said Bill Kentrup, Executive Director of ECA. “Through persistent collective effort, we can bring to market climate finance tools that will accelate capital into climate-aligned assets and in turn,  significantly mitigate greenhouse gasses.” 

“As a fellow pioneer in the Web3 space, their participation is invaluable,” said Kentrup, “and we’re sincerely excited about the potential this partnership holds for the future.”