cryptoart-footprint
Estimate the total CO2 footprint for popular CryptoArt platforms. The goal is to accurately quantify the ecological damage of Ethereum 1.0 PoW-backed CryptoArt platforms.
To estimate the footprint for a specific Ethereum wallet or contract (up to 10,000 transactions) try carbon.fyi. To estimate the footprint of a specific artwork try cryptoart.wtf.
Status as of March 8, 2021:
Platform | Gas | Transactions | kgCO2 |
---|---|---|---|
OpenSea | 143,595,457,124 | 650,670 | 45,538,734 |
Nifty Gateway | 22,066,205,976 | 80,700 | 8,317,022 |
Rarible | 20,481,970,952 | 162,561 | 6,593,793 |
Makersplace | 20,085,695,013 | 64,142 | 5,403,452 |
SuperRare | 13,477,071,163 | 147,399 | 3,877,450 |
Foundation | 3,238,001,997 | 20,239 | 1,570,449 |
Known Origin | 4,430,905,450 | 18,110 | 1,341,819 |
Zora | 1,315,299,735 | 4,859 | 583,004 |
Async | 1,413,941,801 | 14,404 | 350,863 |
Run
First, sign up for an API key at Etherscan. Create env.json
and add the API key. It should look like:
{
"etherscan-api-key": "<etherscan-api-key>"
}
Install requests pip install requests
if it is not already available.
Then run the script: python cryptoart-footprint.py > footprint.tsv
This may take longer the first time, while your local cache is updated.
To also estimate the footprint for Nifty Gateway, add the --ng
flag. This takes much longer than other platforms, because Nifty Gateway uses a separate smart contract per exhibition/drop.
Methodology
The footprint of a platform is the sum of the footprints for all artwork on the platform. Most platforms use a few Ethereum contracts to handle all artworks. For each contract, we download all the transactions associated with the contract from Etherscan. Then for each transaction, we compute the kgCO2/gas footprint for that day, based on three values:
- The emissions intensity in kgCO2/kWh for the entire Ethereum network. This is an average of the emissions intensity for each mining pool in 2019, weighted by their percentage of the hashrate.
- The total power used during that day, estimated by Digiconomist.
- The total gas used during that day, measured by Etherscan.
The total kgCO2 for a platform is equal to the sum of the gas used for each transaction times the kgCO2/gas on that day. Finally, we add 20% to handle "network inefficiencies and unnaccounted for mining pools" as described by Offsetra.
Limitations
- Digiconomist's Bitcoin estimates have been criticized as low (5x too low) or high (2x too high) compared to other estimates. It may be possible to make a more accurate estimate for Ethereum following a different methodology, based on the available mining hardware and corresponding power usage. That said, even the official Ethereum website references Digiconomist when discussing the power usage.
- Mining pool locations and the corresponding emissions intensity may have changed significantly from the 2019 values. A full correction might correspond to a +/-50% change.