A few weeks ago, Tesla’s Elon Musk made a statement that the company would accept BTC as a means of payment to purchase a Tesla vehicle. In addition, the company has invested millions in BTC and holds it on its balance sheet.
Now, Elon Musk seems to retract what he did and is now discontinuing the use of BTC as a means of payment due to environmental concerns.
This announcement comes after three months of accepting BTC as a means of payment, the value of bitcoin declined sharply after Musk’s tweet, dropping from about $54,700 per coin to about $52,000 in less than an hour. He also added that the company is looking for other cryptocurrencies that use less energy.
XRP could be the one Elon Musk is seeking
According to LeafScore, the top 10 sustainable cryptocurrencies are:
- Stellar Lumens (XLM)
- XRP
- Burst Coin (BURST)
- Tron (TRX)
- EOSIO (EOS)
- Nano (NANO)
- Cardano (ADA)
- BitGreen (BITG)
- SolarCoin (SLR)
- Ethereum (ETH)
With over 4,500 tokens to choose from, I’m sure I’ve overlooked a few good choices for long-term cryptocurrencies. With the rapid development in digital finance, the best is likely yet to come. Please leave a comment or give us an email if you know of a cryptocurrency that is environmentally friendly.
In the meantime, if you’re an investor who has already re-allocated funds from fossil fuel firms and other non-sustainable investments, you should consider doing the same for any cryptocurrencies you own.
According to a 2020 article, XRP was “designed with sustainability in mind,” and claims the cryptocurrency to be inherently green. Unlike Bitcoin, where there is a maximum supply to be mined, all XRP is already in existence, meaning no additional mining processes that require energy consumption will be needed to produce more.
“The unsustainable mining practices and proof-of-work mechanism behind Bitcoin and Ethereum are massive barriers for the more widespread adoption of cryptocurrencies. But not all blockchains are made equally.”
Ripple compared the energy consumption between 1 million transactions of XRP and Bitcoin. 1 million transactions in XRP could power 79,000 lightbulb hours, and 1 million transactions in Bitcoin could power 4.51 billion lightbulb hours, meaning XRP is 57,000 times more efficient than Bitcoin, according to the post.
