For weeks, the financial sheets have been plastered with headlines about cryptocurrencies and their considerable environmental toll. As a result Bitcoin, once the standard by which all cryptocurrencies were judged, is in the midst of a free fall.
Bitcoin's proof-of-work system, which secures most of the world's blockchains, is simply untenable in light of its considerable environmental impact. Either the methodology behind Bitcoin has to change, or a new token might be forced to take up the Bitcoin mantle.
And that new token could very well be Ethereum.
Thanks to recent developments, developers could wrap up Ether's transition to the new, more energy-efficient proof-of-stake system by the end of the year. Once the switch is made, Ethereum and the blockchain behind it should use 99 point several more 9s percent less power than it did previously.
"I'm definitely very happy that one of the biggest problems of the blockchain will go away once proof of stake is complete," Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum's inventor, told Bloomberg.
Under proof-of-work, a vast global network of power-hungry rigs must churn away at complex cryptographic puzzles to verify each transaction. As a result, every time someone buys, sells, or sends Ethereum, 96.26 kWh is expended, roughly equivalent to the amount of energy that an average U.S. household uses every 3.25 days.
You might wonder how on earth verifying a single transaction could use up so much energy.
It all comes down to economics. Proof-of-work is a "first solved, first paid system." Miners with the most power-hungry, hardware-dense computers can verify transactions faster and therefore earn more tokens. What results from this system is an ever-escalating pattern of energy usage, with miners locked in a perpetual race to out gun each other in terms of hardware, using up more and more energy in order to secure the chance to earn more money.
Proof-of-stake, on the other hand, is a "most invested, most earned" system. The more tokens an investor stakes in the blockchain, the greater the chance they'll have of being chosen to verify the next block, and thus the more free tokens they'll earn. So instead of using more energy, miners (or, in this case, verifiers) are incentivized to buy more stake.
Under this system, the upfront investment is what keeps the network secure. So long as the required stake remains higher than the fees that an verifier could earn, the network remains trustworthy.
With proof-of-stake, "you can verify a blockchain with a consumer laptop," Danny Ryan, a researcher at the Ethereum Foundation, told Bloomberg. "My estimate is that you'd see 1/10,000th of the energy than the current Ethereum network."
Thanks to proof-of-stake, Ethereum might just eclipse Bitcoin as the world's primary digital token. Free of the environmental concerns that swirl around Bitcoin, no doubt Ethereum could become the go-to cryptocurrency among environmentally-minded millennials.
"Ethereum has a massive ecosystem of decentralized finance use cases with rapidly growing adoption," Dan Morehead, founder of Pantera, a Bitcoin investment firm, told Bloomberg. "Combine these two dynamics, and we think Ethereum will keep gaining market share relative to Bitcoin."
As far as when the new protocol will debut, insiders at the Ethereum foundation put the date sometime toward late 2021 and early 2022.
Tim Beiko, who coordinates Ethereum's many developers in building out the new network, recently tweeted out test results showing that transactions on Ethereum's existing blockchain could be verified using proof-of-stake.
"I'm more confident than I was a month ago," Beiko told Bloomberg. "There's a bunch of non-tribal issues to figure out, but the fundamental architecture set is pretty promising."