Following on from CloudTech Group CEO, Kevin He, and his talk around the need for compliance and regulatory cooperation as a means for blockchain achieving mass adoption, was Dr. Hai Dong, from RMIT. Dong is one of the co-founders of the Green Crypto Joint Research Laboratory, a collaboration between RMIT and CloudTech.

The two parties originally came together after noting the distinct absence of truly ‘green’ technology in blockchain, the laboratory being the natural first step in addressing this issue. And while discussions around compliance might be lost on some, there is no doubt that efforts to make blockchain technology kinder to the Earth are front and centre in the minds of a lot of crypto enthusiasts. No doubt the topic was particularly fresh in the minds of the audience, given that Ethereum’s hugely-anticipated Merge had occurred a few days earlier.

Their goal, at its core, is simple: to develop the next generation of green cryptocurrency technologies.

Even to the uninitiated, this seems a broad and ambitious goal. And of course, beneath any singular pursuit are smaller, more complex challenges. In the case of this particular project there are four distinct areas of focus:

    1. Scalability and Performance of Green Consensus Algorithms

    2. AI-Enabled Blockchain Optimization

    3. Security and Privacy of Green Consensus Algorithms
‍
    4. Green Blockchain Based File Storage

Most people who hold an interest in blockchain technology, no matter how big or small, will notice within these four areas issues that are discussed often in the blockchain community, notably ones surrounding scalability, accessibility, security, and privacy. The challenge that sets this project apart is that it wants to address each issue in an environmentally responsible way.

And from Dong’s presentation, it is clear that this collaboration is taking the necessary steps to achieving this. The AI-Enabled Blockchain Optimization, for example, will allow for the accurate estimate of energy needed to perform tasks on the blockchain, while also rewarding miners for using renewable sources to perform their tasks. Building a new ‘green’ consensus mechanism, one that corrects the obvious shortcomings of current and established mechanisms such as PoW (Proof of Work) and PoS (Proof of Stake) is also a feature the laboratory plans to develop by project’s end.

Given this project is still in the earlier stages of its development, Dr. Dong was only able to give a broad idea to the audience of what to expect. That said, further research in the wake of the convention shows that the scope and ambition of this project is as forward-thinking as anything in the crypto-world right now. And with part two of the talk over, Dong introduced Dr. Xingliang Yuan from Monash University, to present the third and final part of the talk: the collaboration between CloudTech Group and Monash, titled ‘Towards Secure and Trustworthy Decentralised Storage with Rich Functions’. This collaboration will be covered in the next article.