Sustainability with Flow

It's no secret that Proof of Stake blockchains are better for the environment. As Web3 becomes more widely adopted, we engaged with Deloitte Canada to validate how much energy it uses. And the results are astounding: Flow uses just 0.18 GWh annually, based on 2021 usage – or in simpler terms, minting an NFT on Flow takes less energy than a Google search or Instagram post.

In addition to operating on a Proof of Stake consensus system, Flow’s multi-role node architecture securely divides the processing between specialized node types, making the network significantly more efficient than other blockchain architectures. As network usage grows, vertical scaling is only needed for the execution nodes (as they execute transactions and persist all the chain state). Because the increase in energy and hardware consumption over time is restricted to a small subset of the nodes in the network, this drastically limits the environmental footprint of the chain.

The overall energy use of the network won’t increase significantly even if the activity increases by 100x or more, making the per-transaction energy footprint decrease over time.