Bitcoin may be the king of cryptocurrencies, but it's facing an environmental backlash over the energy-intensive technology underpinning it.
A new crypto called chia says it's the eco-friendly alternative.
Like most digital currencies, chia runs on a decentralized ledger system known as blockchain. But unlike bitcoin, chia, which was founded by the inventor of BitTorrent, claims it has a much smaller carbon footprint with its mining process of verifying and recording transactions.
Chia logged its first trades this week, joining a crowded crypto scene at a time of frenzied investor interest in alternative digital assets.
Chia, which is also being advertised basis its greener approach and greater sustainability, users can continue to mine the coin using as much power as a PC would typically do in idle state. Those who manage to integrate Chia into an AWS cloud platform will not even need that, but still get to commit space and time to the coin’s decentralised distributed ledger technology. While some have already argued (such as in this CNN Business report) that whether Chia can be termed ‘green’ or not is really in relativity to other cryptocurrencies, there is no denying that Chia does have a far more sustainable model – both in terms of energy consumption and the kind of PC components that a user would require to have for it.