Research by NFT education company, NFT Club has found that around 4 million trees are required to offset CryptoKitties’ carbon emissions. The company analysed an NFT’s energy consumption over a lifetime to understand the number of trees required to offset its emissions. It also factored in the number of sales of top collections. As per its research, CryptoKitties has produced nearly 240 million kilograms of carbon dioxide.
It requires millions of trees to offset the carbon produced by top NFT collections. Credits: Unsplash
NFTs’ environmental cost is a much-debated topic in the industry. As per NFT Club, “an average NFT will produce 211kg of carbon dioxide” in a lifetime due to NFT minting and purchasing. Apparently, a single tree can offset 60kg of CO2 on average. As a result, it takes 3.52 trees “to offset the life of an NFT”.
NFT collections with the highest emissions: Can they offset their carbon?
NFT Club claims that the process of minting an NFT alone produces 83kg of carbon. This is especially because thousands of miners attempt to verify the transaction. Unfortunately, emissions don’t end with minting alone. 23kg of CO2 is produced every time someone places a bid for an NFT. In addition, every NFT sale produces 51kg of CO2. Lastly, every NFT transfer is responsible for 30kg of CO2.
Besides, secondary NFT sales produce an additional 81kg of CO2. 1.35 trees are required to offset the carbon produced here.
Taking into account all the above factors, NFT Club found the top five NFT collections with the most carbon emissions. While CryptoKitties takes the top spot, Sorare is second after producing 35 million kg of CO2. It would take 580,337 trees to offset this.
Axie Infinity and Art Blocks take the next two spots and produce 27 million kg of CO2 and 23.1 million kg of CO2, respectively. While it would take 461,951 trees to offset the carbon produced by the former, the latter needs 385,451 trees. Lastly, The Sandbox requires 192,912 trees to offset 11.6 million kg of its carbon emissions.
