The cryptocurrency market plunged during early Thursday trading after Tesla CEO, Elon Musk stated that the electric car maker would no longer accept Bitcoin due to the rate of energy consumption when mining cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin plunged to lows of $46,000 before recovering mildly to around $49,500 where it trades presently. The majority of Altcoins also traded in red except few selected tokens such as Cardano (ADA), Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR), Nano (NANO), Quant (QNT), Energy Web Token (EWT) which thrived due to the ongoing debate for energy efficiency.
The debate for energy efficiency sparked off when Elon Musk tweeted “We are also looking at other cryptocurrencies that use <1% of Bitcoin’s energy/transaction.”
Bitcoin uses a ‘Proof of Work’ algorithm which involves mining hash rate to produce a single token. Cryptocurrencies that instead use the ‘Proof of Stake’ consensus use far less energy, as do currencies using a technology called block-lattice, which doesn’t require mining.
Cardano (ADA)
Cardano’s (ADA) price rallied to new all-time highs of $2.03, as traders and analysts plow into a digital asset that states it’s a much less carbon-intensive alternative.
Cardano CEO, Charles Hoskinson was earlier quoted to have stated that Cardano was 1.6 million times more energy-efficient than Bitcoin. Also, senior analyst at investing.com, Jesse Cohen was noted to have pointed to Cardano’s ADA as one of the two cryptocurrencies with more sustainable environmental costs than Bitcoin.
Kusama (KSM)
Kusama is a scalable multi-chain network for radical innovation and early-stage Polkadot deployments. Kusama’s climb to new all-time highs of $587 came off after the network announced the imminent opening of Kusama’s Parachain auctions, with its Testnet going live.
It stated on May 12 ”Upgrade v0.9.1 passed council and is now a public referendum. This upgrade includes the code for Parachains, auctions, and Crowdloans reduces the min. vested transfer by 100x and reduces fees/deposits by 50x.”
Hedera Hashgraph (HBAR)
With the debate on energy efficiency raging hot, enterprise blockchain solution, Hedera Hashgraph is another cryptocurrency that comes to mind. French utility giant Électricité de France (EDF) reportedly joined the governing council of Hedera Hashgraph in March, in a bid to become carbon neutral.
Pawan Anand, Application Development Team Lead at Accenture stated that a report that focuses on the amount of power required to operate Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Hedera Hashgraph concluded that Hedera was the most sustainable blockchain technology. As of press time, Hedera Hashgraph was trading at $0.35, up 31.06% in the last 24 hours.
NANO (NANO)
According to Leafscore, Nano remains a top choice as one of the leading energy-efficient and eco-friendly cryptocurrencies of 2021. Nano, although proof of work reliant, uses block-lattice technology, which is energy efficient. Digiconomist estimates that compared to 950 kWh for each Bitcoin transaction, Nano uses just 0.112 Wh.
Nano surged from lows of $8.54 to intraday highs of $18.57, rallying nearly 100% following Elon Musk’s tweet of searching for cryptos that use less than a percent of BTC’s energy.
Energy Web Token (EWT)
Energy Web Token is another token that enjoyed a massive pump after Tesla’s CEO tweeted about searching for cryptocurrencies that use <1% of Bitcoin’s energy. Energy Web Token (EWT) is the operational token behind the Energy Web Chain, a blockchain-based virtual machine designed to support and further application development for the energy sector.
EWT aims to bring diversity to the energy sector by allowing developers to create decentralized applications (DApps). At the time of writing, EWT was trading at $17.53, up 35.17% in the last 24 hours.
Quant (QNT)
Quant was launched in June 2018 intending to connect blockchains and networks on a global scale, without reducing the efficiency and interoperability of the network. It claims to be the first project to solve the interoperability problem through the creation of the first blockchain operating system. QNT had a massive breakout from a month-long consolidation bout, reaching all-time highs of $61.7 on May 13.
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