Why Polygon?

Summary as of August 2024:
In 2022, Polygon stated they achieved carbon neutrality by purchasing and immediately retiring $400,000 in carbon credits, actively offsetting ~90,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions. This was part of a larger $20 million commitment to carbon sustainability. Polygon mainly collaborates with KlimaDAO, ensuring high-impact environmental projects tied to carbon credits are strategically and consistently funded and retired credits cannot be reclaimed through use of KlimaDao’s Retirement Aggregator. They have a little over 20 million carbon credit tokens available, mostly BCT tokens. After the 2022 Merge, Polygon's carbon emissions dropped by ~99.94%, and they now retire substantially more carbon credits compared to the carbon emissions they emit. Polygon’s efforts have far exceeded expectations; time will tell if the results exceed expectations as well.
In addition to these measures, because Polygon is built on the Ethereum blockchain it is able to execute NFT smart contracts using the Ethereum Virtual Machine while keeping gas fees low and allowing transactions to occur rapidly.

Polygon Carbon Emissions and Offset, Explained

  • In 2022, Polygon professed to have achieved carbon neutrality by offsetting the entirety of its output of carbon emissions through the purchase and immediate retirement of $400,000 worth of carbon credits, which they reported corresponded to the removal of approximately 90,000 tonnes of CO₂ emissions that had been released since the inception of the Polygon chain. The initial $400,000 purchase was part of a larger $20 million commitment Polygon made towards carbon sustainability and achieving a carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative status.
  • This effort was part of a broader initiative in collaboration with KlimaDAO, a decentralized organization focusing on environmental projects. With KlimaDAO's retirement aggregator, Polygon could purchase and strategically retire high impact carbon credit tokens, which ensured those projects not only remained funded but also were incentivized to ramp up and grow; especially since retiring on-chain carbon credit tokens guarantees that an equivalent amount of CO₂ is actively removed or prevented from entering the atmosphere and once retired those credits could indisputably not be claimed by anyone else.
  • You can verify the 20 million dollar pledge via KlimaData, which shows the amount of carbon credit tokens there are on the Polygon chain as well as the total amount that have been retired so far. There are currently a little over 20 million carbon credit tokens stored on the Polygon chain (most of which are BCT tokens), which are safe to assume corroborate their 20 million dollar pledge since many credits available for retirement on the Carbonmark marketplace (listed on KlimaDAO which calls it the “universal carbon marketplace”) are available for either a little under or over $1. We can assume this most likely is industry standard.
  • Considering the Merge that happened in 2022 which was predicted to reduce the carbon emissions of Polygon transactions by approximately 99.91% percent (closer to 99.94% when I calculated using real annual values of ~60,953.26 tCO₂e as was measured in July 2022 compared to approximately ~35 tCO₂e emitted annually in August 2023 and ~39 tCO₂e emitted annually in July of this year) and that the rate at which Polygon is selectively retiring carbon credit tokens (a total of almost 665,000T as of July 2024, of which a little over 394,000T were retired since just January of this year) far exceeds their actual annual carbon emissions of ~39 tCO₂e, while continuously restructuring their carbon offset measures to be maximally effective, it is safe to say that Polygon is exceeding expectation measures towards sustainability. Time will tell whether the results are as expected or exceed as well.