3 Ways to Reduce the Climate Impact of Your Web3 Data

By George Trujillo, Principal Data Strategist, DataStax

Web3 is now firmly established as a technology ecosystem that allows developers to create decentralized applications. But reliance on blockchain technology has also raised concerns about its environmental impact.

The process of verifying transactions on the blockchain requires enormous computing power and, consequently, a lot of electricity. A single bitcoin transaction uses an estimated 635 kWh of electricity, or the same amount of electricity used by 21 US homes per day.

Blockchain is a crucial part of Web3, but to take full advantage of this new decentralized world, the data running Web3 applications must be collected, processed, and analyzed outside of blockchain in real-time. In order to be as energy conscious as possible, companies need to pay special attention to how they deal with all the real-time data off the blockchain.

Here are some ideas on how to sustainably manage the real-time data that powers your Web3 apps.

Where and how you store your data is important

Blockchain is the fundamental building block of Web3: it creates a distributed ledger and acts as a system of record for transactions taking place in this brave new world. But the data running Web3 applications is collected, processed, analyzed and stored outside of the blockchain.

This is good for several reasons. The power of blockchain is nowhere near fast enough to build rich, real-time applications that consume the data (and the highly responsive dashboards, recommendation engines, digital wallets, and analytics required to support those applications). Even if the blockchain were responsive enough to process this type of data, the computing power required would be extreme.

A smart way to “decarbonize” your Web3 applications is to be aware of the resources all your data consumes.

The hyperscalers (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google — the tech titans that manage vast computing infrastructure to enable the rest of us to build virtualized computing environments) all have plans to meet the goal of 100 data centers in the next few years % to operate with renewable energy decade.

That’s great news, but you still have work to do. You need to make sure you’re using even the smallest amount of computing power and infrastructure. First, you should leverage tools that use AI to identify “abandoned projects”: deployed infrastructure that is idle.

Another simple but important part of this approach is having dedicated teams focused on optimizing cloud usage. Facebook, for example, did it Reduce processing power and storage space by 25% just by optimizing WhatsApp, with no performance loss. Bottom Line: Use only what you need and look for savings on your usage.

Focus on consumption-based services

Another important way to reduce the impact of your Web3 data residing outside of the blockchain is to use products and services that reduce the capacity required. Moving to serverless architectures is a crucial part of reducing resource consumption and therefore emissions. It is estimated that the Utilization of the hyperscalers is still below 50%. Procuring services based on infrastructure units or with pricing models fixed on nodes or servers is a major cause of this idle consumption.

Over-provisioning and dedicated instances make the problem worse. It’s the same pattern as moving from physical machines to virtual machines and to containers: utilization improved somewhat, but it wasn’t radically different. In order to decarbonize cloud services, it is crucial that any cloud service used is based on a serverless architecture, where you pay for consumption that more closely correlates with your actual usage – and therefore with your carbon footprint.

For example, DataStax Astra DB, the serverless Database-as-a-Service built on Apache Cassandra^®, scales elastically to peak loads. This auto-scaling feature also reduces database resources when not needed, automatically eliminating wasted computing power.

Take a good look

It is important to have a clear view of the carbon impact of your cloud usage. This means that all consumed services must be consolidated across all hyperscalers in a way that allows your organization to instrument, audit, analyze and report on your business goals. Any third-party cloud services you use must also be integrated into this reporting. Under a recent SEC proposal, organizations would have to report their greenhouse gas emissions – along with those of their supply chains. This is yet another reason to integrate your cloud service usage with corporate environment, social media and governance (ESG) reporting.

Don’t be a Web3 carbon glutton

In the rush to build Web3 applications, it’s easy to overlook the responsibility and accountability required to deliver this stack in a sustainable and ecological manner. Knowing how best to use blockchain will help you get the modern, real-time experiences and value your customers expect while minimizing the environmental impact as much as possible.

Learn more about DataStax here.

About George Trujillo:

George is a senior data strategist at DataStax. Previously, he built high-performance teams on data value-centric initiatives at organizations such as Charles Schwab, Overstock and VMware. George works with CDOs and data managers to continuously evolve real-time data strategies for their enterprise data ecosystem.