Author: Dani Leca

This article originally ran on the Forbes Tech Council site in Oct 2022 as part of Chao Cheng-Shorland’s leadership series.

Web3.0, sometimes abbreviated as Web3, is bringing about an era of the internet that will consist of a more decentralized infrastructure, as well as a metaverse where users want more control over their data and online privacy. The companies that will succeed in the Web3.0 era will be the ones that create brand new models to solve or prevent some of our most entrenched problems.

Digital privacy, security and the unlikely contender of excessive carbon emissions are three of today’s problems that can be addressed using Web3 tools. Not only that but they can all be improved upon using the same platform. As we sit here today, very few people are worried about the carbon emissions created by the tens of billions of digital attachments sent around the world, but from my perspective, as someone who works at a blockchain smart document company, I see the amount of needless energy waste already taking place.

First, let’s look at the data. Studies show an average email attachment emits about 50g of CO2 into the atmosphere (from Mike Berners-Lee’s book How Bad Are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee ). This is largely due to the electricity required by the elaborate infrastructure of data centers around the world that process and store each message. Further calculations estimate the average office worker receives about 6,000 attachments that they ignore each year. This all adds up to the equivalent of a passenger car driving 1,093 miles for each office worker. Those numbers don’t even include the many more attachments that workers do open, so the total carbon impact is much higher.

The good news is we don’t have to keep going down this path. Blockchain platforms and immutable ledgers already have a preventative solution built right inside. By being able to access files—be they documents, contracts or multimedia—from a type of access point, which people can be sure hasn’t been tampered with, we can slash the amount of carbon created from sending attachments. I’ve taken to calling this concept the “single source of truth”—the idea that we can create immutable, secure records and send people to a single source instead of generating multiple copies of the original and sending those copies out into the world.

This also provides greater opportunities to put safeguards in place so creators have control over their work. You won’t have to worry that something you’ve attached in an email will be shared with others beyond to whom you have sent it. And if you want to revoke access to the original, you can take it down or turn off someone else’s permissions. Not only does a Web3 approach mitigate carbon emissions, but it also creates a whole new world of privacy and security and cuts down on the need for even more physical infrastructure to support the tens of billions of attachments sent around the world every day.

Of course, I can’t mention blockchain and the environment without touching on Bitcoin and the enormous energy usage it takes. While mining for Bitcoin is entirely different from the single-source-of-truth model that I predict will be our future, there are signs that people are moving to a greener crypto landscape. Even though right now we’re looking at an industry that consumes an estimated .55% of the world’s electricity, the energy consumption isn’t something that will last.

The best part about this is how easy it will be to adopt a new normal. Instead of a major behavior change, it is only a shift in mindset that is required. In the same way that we now put on seat belts without thinking too much about it or tossing something in a recycling bin instead of the trash, we can easily move toward a world where we only download exactly what we need.

We already do something like this for simple documents in platforms such as GoogleDocs, but as Web3 gets more sophisticated, we’ll be able to host a greater variety of content with greater levels of privacy. From business and personal records, contracts, deeds and all the other documents we use on a daily basis to original art and music, it can all be housed in a much lower carbon environment.

Sustainability is not a word you often hear associated with Web3. But it can become a cornerstone of the digital universe with very little overhead cost and minimal effort. While I do see some would initially be skeptical of me advocating for a decentralized model to solve a major digital sustainability issue, it turns out the solution is exactly what Web3 needs.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/10/03/why-web30-is-more-sustainable-than-you-think/?sh=7c67433146e7

Photo by Matthias Heyde/Unsplash