The Top 5 Energy Efficient Cryptocurrencies

Elon Musk caused a stir in the cryptocurrency community yesterday when he announced that Tesla would stop accepting bitcoin for transactions due to its massive energy use and that they are actively searching for cryptocurrencies that use <1% of bitcoin’s energy to use instead. Which might he choose to replace bitcoin’s current 150 terawatt-hour energy use annually?

5 Best Energy Efficient Cryptocurrency than Bitcoin

Below are the top 5 Cryptocurrencies, that use much less energy compared to Bitcoin at the Moment.

#1: Nanocurrency (Nano)

Nanocurrency tops the list as the most energy-efficient cryptocurrency that could potentially replace Bitcoin as a currency and store of value. At less than .1 watt-hours expended per transaction, the whole network runs on little more than a windmill’s worth of energy per year and has better scarcity than bitcoin (i.e. zero inflation vs 120 more years of inflation for bitcoin). Transactions of any size are near-instant and feeless.

Nano uses a security model that doesn’t rely on energy use, called Open Representative Voting, that has kept user funds safe on the live network running continuously for the last four years. And it manages to be scalable, with hundreds of transactions per second, by giving each user account its own blockchain (called a Directed Acyclic Graph, or DAG).

Importantly, unlike bitcoin, the energy use doesn’t climb with the value of the coin. This is also the most decentralized network on our list, making it the #1 green alternative. The market seems to agree, since it was up ~50% after Elon’s tweet yesterday (but still less than a $2B market cap) amidst a sea of losses among other Top-100 coins.

#2: Vite (VITE)

Vite is a DAG-based platform like Nanocurrency with the same energy efficiency and feeless transactions, but that also includes smart contracts. This makes it similar to Ethereum in that it is meant to be a platform for decentralized finance (DeFi), but more energy efficient, and also touting feeless transactions (versus those pesky gas fees on other chains). The network is newer and growing quickly, so keep your eye on it.

#3: Solana (SOL)

Supported by kingmaker Sam Bankman-Fried (CEO of FTX), Solana is another energy efficient, high throughput, smart contract platform. They are quite centralized, with a few heavy-duty nodes subsidized by a large developer fund that eschews the cypherpunk ethos, but still a much more energy efficient alternative to energy-guzzling proof-of-work chains — and it has a lot of momentum and ongoing development.

#4: Stellar Lumens (XLM)

Stellar is a fork of the centralized Ripple protocol, also meant to be a fast and low fee way to send any kind of currency globally, working in concert with the traditional financial system rather than replacing it. It has a built in peer to peer DEX, and has been running since 2014.

#5: Banano (BAN)

Rounding out the list is the meme-fork of Nanocurrency, with a fun-loving community that loves sharing potassium with fellow “monkeys.” The supply is more centralized than Nano, but hey, why not have some energy-efficient fun?

Author: Nano by the bay