Zumo's Kirsteen Harrison Delves into the Nuances of the Digital Asset Sector's Energy Consumption

The “power-hungry” nature of digital assets has been an easy target for Bitcoin skeptics over the years. From the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations to legislators and industry leaders

Institutions are increasingly showing interest in digital assets, and as a result, there is a growing demand for sustainable solutions within the digital asset sector. This is because a significant portion of institutional investors' portfolios is allocated to ESG-compliant assets. In an interview with CoinGeek Backstage, Kirsteen Harrison, director of sustainability at Zumo, highlighted the nuances of the energy consumption narrative and how it can be a strength for the digital asset sector.

Zumo is an Edinburgh, Scotland-based company that provides digital asset solutions with a focus on sustainability and compliance. As a digital asset intermediary, Zumo realized the importance of addressing the sector's carbon footprint early on. This led to the creation of Oxygen, an institutional crypto sustainability service.

Harrison explained that Oxygen helps institutional investors align their digital asset investments with ESG principles. It also caters to exchanges, wallets, banks, fintechs, and other intermediaries.

“We work with them to quantify [their energy consumption and carbon footprint] and apportion it, and then we work with them to mitigate against that through the procurement of renewable energy certificates and to prove that on the blockchain, too.”

Harrison participated in a panel at the London Blockchain Conference that discussed embedding sustainability in the digital asset ETF revolution. The company also played a key role in the launch of Europe's first ESG-aligned spot BTC ETF, by Jacobi Asset Management.

Harrison, who has been in the sustainability sector for over two decades, believes that the narrative around the energy consumption of the digital asset sector fails to take into account important nuances. For example, critics often reduce everything to a single electricity consumption figure, which tends to paint the sector as power-hungry without considering the economic impact.

However, she told CoinGeek Backstage host Becky Liggero that this oversimplification can be a strength for the sector.

“The fact that we can point easily to that number, which is our carbon footprint, means that we can take action to reduce it through the use of renewable energy.”

Another nuance that is rarely highlighted is the utility of Bitcoin. Other related sectors, such as traditional finance, assess their environmental impact based on their utility, not the raw input. For example, the aviation sector consumes 2,500 TWh annually and is responsible for 2.5% of global CO₂ emissions, nearly twenty times that of the digital asset sector. However, its utility and impact on the global economy justify this raw energy use.

Adding to the narrative is the utility of individual blockchains. Some, like BTC and Ethereum, have remained limited to a handful of transactions per second, which makes them only useful for the elite and the speculators. BSV, on the other hand, scales unbounded, facilitating thousands of transactions per second. With the Teranode upgrade early next year, the network will process over a million transactions per second, making it the only enterprise-ready blockchain network globally.

In recent years, the energy consumption debate has shifted towards bashing proof-of-work and advocating for proof-of-stake as the improved consensus mechanism. However, PoS deviates from the decentralization ethos of blockchain technology, handing the power of providing consensus to a small group of elites with the most tokens. Even then, it still doesn’t scale for enterprise use, as Ethereum has proven.

As Satoshi Nakamoto designed it, BSV has proven that proof-of-work scales unboundedly for global use with the lowest fees and a stable protocol while still being energy-efficient.

Watch Bryan Daugherty on Proof of ESG initiative through a sustainable blockchain

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