Polygon Commits $20 Million to Go Carbon Neutral in 2022

The Polygon network has announced its ambition to become carbon neutral and climate positive this year, with the release of its plans to be climate positive, dubbed “Green Manifesto: A Smart Contract with Planet Earth”. The layer-two Ethereum scaling solution has also made a $20 million (roughly Rs. 152 crore) pledge to offset its carbon footprint and will also allow people to purchase extra credit to become carbon negative. The Manifesto mentions that every non-fungible token (NFT) minted, decentralised finance (DeFi) trade, bridging token built on Polygon is accountable for its environmental impact.

Polygon's plans include promoting a sustainable future by offering resources to ecosystem partners that want to reduce their carbon footprint. The network is also planning to offer the infrastructure and finances needed for the ecosystem partners that want to offset their carbon footprint. The network planning to support NGOs that want to donate towards eradicating climate change.

According to the company, the “Green Manifesto” places freedom “at the core of the Web 3 ethos,” with climate change being the most serious threat to that liberty.

For starters, Polygon is working with KlimaDAO, a developer-led group that delivers on-chain carbon off-setting technology, as well as Offsetra, which provides Polygon with a carbon intensity measurement tool. The aim is to better build a management strategy by studying emissions from staking node hardware or bridging activities, as well as energy consumption from connecting with the Ethereum Mainnet.

Polygon also published an emissions analysis that found that 99% of Polygon's emissions are due to checkpointing and bridging activities that involve transactions on Ethereum Mainnet. Polygon cited total network emissions of 90,645 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) from February 2021 to February 2022, under companies like Microsoft and Deloitte.

The new manifesto comes within days of Polygon working on some key developments including a new identity verification platform powered by zero-knowledge (ZK) cryptography. The service, called Polygon ID, will help in verifying users' information while preserving their on-chain privacy.

Using Polygon ID, applications running on the blockchain will be able to authenticate user data while keeping sensitive information private. Polygon's development team says that the team will leverage iden3, a decentralised identity protocol that uses zero-knowledge proofs, to make this happen.