What happened
The Polygon (MATIC 1.28%) project is having a good day this Friday. At 1:40 p.m. ET, the token had gained 19.4% in 24 hours. The crypto sector as a whole showed plenty of upticks over the same period on a generally bullish day for investment markets, but mostly in single-digit percentages. Polygon gained an extra boost by announcing that it has achieved a net-zero impact on carbon emissions.
So what
As a Proof-of-Stake blockchain network, Polygon already consumed a minimal amount of computing power and electric energy. On top of that power-sipping architecture, the project has bought and retired $400,000 of blockchain-based carbon credits. This effort provided capital to environmental projects in Belize, India, and the Amazon rainforest, worth nearly 105,000 tons of greenhouse gases in total. That's more than the amount of greenhouse gas that Polygon has generated in its five-year history.
Now what
Polygon isn't a fully functional cryptocurrency on its own. It's a scaling booster laid atop the Ethereum (ETH -1.24%) network, boosting the smart contract platform's scale and connecting it to other crypto networks. Therefore, Polygon's total impact on the environment is a little bit murky since it actually depends on a power-hungry Proof-of-Work system.
Moreover, the carbon neutrality status was achieved by investing in the KlimaDAO project -- a legit environmental activist group tracking its activities with a Polygon-based token. So this announcement is just a little bit self-serving, attracting attention to what the Polygon platform can do.
That being said, it's always good to see crypto projects working to limit and offset their environmental impact. When Ethereum joins the low-power Proof-of-Stake community through the Merge, Polygon's effective carbon footprint will shrink again. So if you're looking for investment ideas in the crypto sector that don't come with a massive environmental cost, you might want to consider Polygon's token.
