April 12, 2022

Our Green Manifesto

A Smart Contract with Planet Earth

When our children ask us what we were doing during the crucial decade when the future of life on Earth hung in the balance, will it be enough to say we were building a complete suite of Ethereum scaling solutions? Will all of our daring ambition, our hard work and ingenuity, our trials, tribulations and victories seem meaningful from the vantage point of the generation that comes after?

We think the answer can be “yes,” but we need to take steps now to make sure that it is. The Polygon team deeply believes that Web3 is a transformative technology that will make the current Internet era seem like the Dark Ages. But we also recognize that in creating that future we cannot ignore the broader context of what technological progress has meant for the planet.

The geological scale of anthropogenic climate change can be almost incomprehensible to a mere human: waters rushing back to the coastlines as the colossal churn of the Gulf stream weakens its pull, thermal expansion of the oceans, days growing longer as gravity-driven liquid bulge at the equator slows the rotation of the Earth. The scope of the problem can be dispiriting, but we can start by doing what’s possible.

That’s why Polygon is eliminating all of the network’s carbon debt going back to inception and then going carbon negative in 2022. This means that every transaction -- an NFT minted by an artist, a DeFi trade that empowers individual economic autonomy, a token bridged to a project building on our network -- is accounted for and its environmental impact is offset. When this goal is achieved, Polygon will work on becoming the first blockchain to be climate positive.

Polygon’s suite of scaling solutions for Ethereum and investments in cutting-edge zero knowledge technology already put it at the forefront of onboarding the next billion users to Web3. This commitment to sustainability is an acknowledgement of the important role we play in the ecosystem and our responsibility to lead by example.

You can read more about how we plan to accomplish this here. Polygon has also commissioned a third-party assessment of our carbon footprint and the results will be published on our blog.

Let’s make meaningful change in the world!