Are proof-of-work blockchains a corporate sustainability issue?

The data center and IT industry is a relatively minor — but nevertheless significant — contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. The issue of wasteful digital infrastructure energy consumption is now high on many corporate agendas and is prompting companies and overseeing authorities to act.

But one of the biggest and most problematic IT-based consumers of energy is not generally covered by these existing and planned sustainability initiatives: cryptocurrency networks — the mining platforms Bitcoin and Ethereum, in particular. While Bitcoin’s huge energy consumption is widely known and elicits strong reactions, the role and use of the energy-intensive blockchain proof-of-work (PoW) security mechanism is rarely discussed in a corporate context, or as part of the overall sustainability challenge. This is beginning to look like an important oversight.