Blockchain for Sustainable Computing in Carbon Markets: Hybrid Consensus and Osmosis

Abstract

Abstract Sustainable development in the modern era depends on three major aspects: social, economic, and environmental sustainability. Evaluating the dimensions of environmental sustainability reveals that carbon emissions are a high-risk threat that significantly contributes to climate change and global warming. The dire need to curb the threat has led to the opening of many sustainable and mindful avenues, such as carbon credit trading. It is a major initiative to alleviate carbon emissions by the process of providing incentives. Traditional systems of carbon credit processing may lead to inefficiencies like lack of transparency and vulnerability. The drawbacks of traditional systems can be overcome by using Blockchain technology, which is decentralized and immutable in nature. The consensus algorithm Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchains consume high energy, which contradicts sustainability. To address the challenge, a hybrid mechanism of Proof-of-Stake (PoS) and Proof-of-Work (PoW) is proposed for carbon credit transfers. The hybrid mechanism is efficient for small to medium-scale applications. Hence, for large-scale applications, Osmosis, a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform built on the Cosmos blockchain, is explored. Experimental results show that the hybrid mechanism reduces energy consumption and carbon emissions by 47%, latency by 80% and increases throughput by 328%. Consequently, this performance enables the increase in transfer of carbon credits by 50%. In case of carbon credit trading of carbon credits, Osmosis exhibits greater energy efficiency, improving the throughput by 14–20 times and 12,500 times lower latency compared to the hybrid mechanism. Further Osmosis emits 200,000 times less CO₂ and transfers twice the number of carbon credits per hour compared to the hybrid mechanism.