Problem: Making a living as an artist is historically extremely challenging. For many artists and their families, the digital art economy built around NFTs has saved them financially, particularly during COVID with its uncertain economy and poor job market. However, minting NFTs has been found to be energy inefficient and damaging to the environment. This has created a division and friction among creatives.
Solution: Wanting to see this friction redirected towards something more productive, we propose a bounty system to reward people for trying to improve the energy efficiency of the NFT economy.
Awareness Bounty: Unfortunately, most artists and collectors are not aware of the many options for minting NFTs and their associated ecological impact. This first bounty will be awarded to a body of research that outlines a wide variety of current projects/solutions and explains how they reduce energy consumption of NFTs. The hope is that by having a consolidated resource with clear information on the advantages of supporting these options, we can immediately reduce the impact of NFTs on the environment without waiting for longer-term solutions.
Solutions Bounty: As exciting as the blockchain is, we are mostly encouraged by the community of bright, young creatives that have formed around it. Yes, there are many efforts in progress to improve efficiency, but most of these are company/platform-driven. We believe great ideas can come from anywhere and hope that an independent bounty for the development of more efficient NFTs will drive some out-of-the-box thinking to complement existing approaches. This bounty is targeted at developers creating open source solutions. Preference will be given to solutions that improve existing markets, as popularizing a new chain/technology from scratch is beyond the scope and capabilities of this bounty program.
Judging: Portions of the bounty will be awarded to teams and individual contributors based on the discretion of a panel of judges who will be selected based on their contributions and good standing within the NFT community. Judges will be announced in the weeks leading up to the beginning of the contest. To date, Matt Hall and John Watkinson, creators of the CryptoPunks have been announced as judges.
Donations: Donations to the GreenNFTs bounty can be made on our Gitcoin page.
Awareness Bounty: Details for the awareness bounty can be found on the GreenNFTs Github repository.
Solutions Bounty: Details for the awareness bounty can be found on the GreenNFTs Github repository.
What are NFTs?
A non-fungible token is a special type of cryptographic token which represents something unique; non-fungible tokens are thus not mutually interchangeable. This is in contrast to cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, and many network or utility tokens, that are fungible in nature.
Artists mint NFTs of their artwork making it available to collectors as digital property with ownership immutably listed on the blockchain.
Why are NFTs bad for the environment?
The majority of NFTs are minted on the Ethereum blockchain. Ethereum currently runs on a paradigm called “Proof of Work” or PoW. The PoW algorithm is very compute intensive and with the rise in popularity of NFTs it has become a problem too large to ignore.
Ethereum does however have a solution on its roadmap. The plan is to switch from PoW to PoS (proof of stake). This should eliminate up to 99% of the power consumption.
Read more about the ecological concerns surrounding NFTs in Memo Akten’s important article The Unreasonable Ecological Cost of #CryptoArt.
How will winners be selected and funds be distributed?
Winners will be selected by a panel of judges chosen for their past contributions and good standing within the community. Funds will be distributed at the judge’s discretion. Funds may be distributed across several teams or to a single entry depending on the strength and number of submissions.
What is GreenNFTs mission?
We aim to unite the NFT community in action to bring awareness to best practices for reducing the ecological footprint of NFTs. We facilitate and incentivize the development of community-driven open source solutions to reduce the carbon footprint of NFTs in the near and middle term while longer-term solutions are being developed by private organizations.
How did the GreenNFTs start?
For more context on how this all started, check this tweet.
We could not have done this without the gracious support of our partners, Gitcoin, and our sister bounty The Mint Fund.
Gitcoin is an open source bounties platform on the Ethereum blockchain. We facilitate a space that allows open source developers to get paid for their work contributing to open source projects and in return, the open source projects get exposure to a vast community of hard-working developers they might not have had otherwise.
We are a mission-driven project whose primary goal is to grow the open source community by allowing for better-incentivized collaboration in the realm of open source software.
The Mint Fund provides artists with the funds (known as gas costs) needed to mint NFTs. The team also offers guidance, mentorship, and advice for our growing community of artists. The fund is accessible to all artists, though they prioritize BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ artists, especially outside of North America and the European Union.