NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are increasingly popular in more and more areas. They can take the form of anything digital and in fact, they’re used by artists to sell their digital works, but also by companies, who buy them for real estate value, buying land in virtual worlds such as Sandbox or Engine.

But, in addition to their great potential and fast deployment, the problem with NFTs lies in the fact that a huge amount of energy is required to validate transactions in a distributed database →. The process to validate an NFT is called minting, and being a rather complex validation system ←, it consumes a lot of energy.

It’s estimated that the average energy consumption per transaction is 82 kWh, equivalent to 48 kg of CO2 per hour. Overall, information technology generates 4% of global CO2 emissions and this figure is expected to triple by 2025. The impact of climate change is therefore clear. Although there’s a tendency to believe that what is digital doesn’t pollute the planet, in reality, it’s one of the areas that, partly because of its exponential growth, has the greatest impact. In fact, the increasing production of data, the storage of information and the generation of digital images will have a major impact on the environment