BUILDING AND MANAGING SUSTAINABLE AND ETHICALLY-SOURCED CRYPTO WEALTH

By: Tarun Gupta, CEO and Founder of Coinshift

grid strain, environmental issues, and graphic card market challenges. To address these concerns, Ethereum (ETH), a popular cryptocurrency, switched to the more energy-efficient Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism last year.

dishonestly. Validators verify new blocks, ensuring network integrity and security, leading to a reduced carbon footprint.

Building green crypto wealth

Crypto is a massive business opportunity today, but with this great opportunity has come great repercussions as well.

In August 2022, the estimated global electricity usage of crypto asset mining in the United States exceeded the annual electricity usage of countries like Argentina and Australia. That’s roughly between 120 billion and 240 billion kilowatt-hours per year.

China faced a similar issue, where a massive number of mining operations began weighing down on the nation’s power grid, which pushed the government to outright ban crypto mining, as well as crypto trading and transactions.

However, these digital assets have proved to be a lucrative wealth opportunity like nothing the world had seen before, and so many Chinese miners had either moved to countries like the US and Kazakhstan, or simply launched illegal underground operations.

Why is Proof-of-Work (POW)

crypto mining so harmful to the environment?

Around 60% of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, used the energyintensive proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism. Miners with high-powered computers solved complex puzzles to verify transactions and earn rewards. This caused energy

Proof-of-Stake (POS): A more environmentally responsible consensus mechanism

With Ethereum shifting consensus mechanisms from Proof-Work to Proof-of-Stake, it would become 99.95% more energy efficient than POS, making it one of the largest and most energy-efficient blockchain networks in the world.

While both consensus mechanisms help blockchains synchronize data, validate information, and process transactions, the processes by which they complete these tasks are different.

In Proof-of-Stake (PoS), validators need to own and stake a certain amount of the digital token (e.g., ETH in Ethereum) to validate transactions. The staked coins act as collateral, which can be lost if the validator behaves

It’s easy to forget sometimes that organizations too have been dabbling with crypto. From SMEs to mega-corporations, more and more companies are recognizing the latent potential of digital currencies.

It’s for this reason that Coinshift was launched, an innovative crypto treasury management firm that helps Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), companies and individuals manage and grow their crypto capital.

Launched in 2021, Coinshift surpassed 1.2 billion in assets managed with more than 80 million in payouts as of May of last year, and has so far raised $17.5 million in funding, up to Series A. Some of the platform’s clients include Uniswap Grants, Balancer Grants, Messari, Maker DAO, Biconomy, and Polygon, to name a few.