Why NFTs Are Bad for the Environment

NFTs might be hot right now, but so is their carbon footprint on Earth's climate. By now, you've probably heard of Non-Fungible Tokens, NFTs for short, which might still mean nothing to you. So just think of them as very expensive trading cards that you can sell, trade, and own in the blockchain. You know, the same service used to trade cryptocurrency like Bitcoin or Ethereum, if you're into that. NFTs are mostly being used to sell digital art right now, like a 10-year anniversary 9-cat that sold for $621,408. But they can also be used to sell ownership of audio files, videos, and text. A good example of this would be Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, selling his very first tweet for nearly $3 million. If you're still following along, NFTs have been around since 2017, but they've just had a huge rise in popularity. But the main problem here is not the absurdity of what some are calling the evolution of fine art collecting, or that you can still copy and download the files someone paid millions of dollars for. The problem is that all these types of crypto transactions require massive amounts of energy because of the high-end computers required to sell, trade, and store cryptocurrency. It's been reported that all these transactions can consume as much energy as a small country. For example, Ethereum's annual energy consumption used to process its crypto transactions is roughly equivalent to Nigeria's annual energy consumption. Then you have Bitcoin trading, which consumes more electricity annually than the whole of Argentina, according to an analysis by Cambridge University. To put things into perspective, Argentina is the eighth-largest country by land area in the world. Of course, all this power consumption can be translated into carbon emissions, since most of the electricity used is coming from fossil fuels and not renewable energy sources. Because of this, some artists have stopped selling with NFTs, like a French digital artist who realized the sale of six of his pieces would consume enough electricity to power his entire studio for two years in just 10 seconds. It's important to highlight, however, that there are alternative NFT platforms called sidechains that are less impactful on the environment. Then there are platforms that buy carbon offsets to be more environmentally conscious. But the main solution most activists advocate for is clean energy. More, if not all, cryptocurrency machines should run on renewable energy like wind, solar, and hydropower. Until then, the key takeaways here are NFTs are good for artists, bad for the environment, and nothing more than a flex for the buyers. I'm sticking with physical art.