Green Crypto: A Bibliometric Analysis of the Sustainability of Cryptocurrency

Abstract

In recent years, the sustainability of cryptocurrencies has gained significant amount of attention. As a result, new green cryptocurrencies have entered the market that use more energy-efficient consensus algorithms. This chapter provides a bibliometric analysis of the literature related to sustainability and cryptocurrency to identify the intellectual structure and key theoretical themes in this domain. Based on data from Web of Science, 172 articles with a bibliography of 8,452 references were reviewed using the software programs Biblioshiny and VOSviewer. The keyword cooccurrence analysis reveals four main topic areas. Within the last year, scholars have begun to address the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in research on Bitcoin, blockchain technology, sustainability, and energy consumption. The chapter concludes with a discussion of future research to explore the adoption of green cryptocurrencies across different levels of a service ecosystem (micro, meso, and macro).