PREPchain reverses the large-scale climate impacts of blockchain technology, while making blockchain more secure & decentralized! In this network, block sealing capacity is proportional not to energy burned or economic resources posted, but renewable energy produced.

Back in January 2009, Hal Finney (recipient of the first Bitcoin transaction) wrote that he was “thinking about how to reduce CO2 emissions from a widespread Bitcoin implementation.” This emissions total and energy-use total from Bitcoin has grown quite a bit since then, and even where Bitcoin is mined using a renewable energy source, that is generally renewable energy not being used for some other purpose for which dirtier energy sources are being used instead.

In a blockchain network using Proof of Work (PoW) like Bitcoin, your ability to participate in securing the network is proportional to the amount of energy you burn. Someone trying to break the immutability/security guarantees would have to burn more energy than the rest of the network combined, which would be both costly and noticeable. This makes for great security but major negative planetary impacts, with Bitcoin using more energy than Colombia or Greece or other midsize countries, and almost getting blockchain technology banned in some jurisdictions.

In Proof of Stake (PoS), your ability to participate in securing the network is proportional to the amount of economic resources you put up. This is close to neutral in terms of impact on planetary sustainability, but presents some additional security vulnerabilities especially to very well-resourced actors.

In Proof of Renewable Energy Production (PREP), your ability to participate in securing the network is proportional to the amount of energy you produce from renewable sources like wind and solar, which you can then use for any purpose you want.

Historically, there was a lot of resistance to using blockchain-based decentralized applications that could add a lot of value to sustainability objectives (e.g. sustainable supply chain track and trace, carbon credit trading) because of the climate impact of Proof of Work. The Merge got rid of most of those objections, but a chain going a big step further will actively draw in sustainability-oriented DApps, followed by those which are formally neutral with respect to climate impacts but would like to be on a more sustainability-enhancing chain. With this project, we could take the huge amount of economic power which will soon be pouring into blockchain technology because of the real value it offers, and use that economic power to incentivize production of energy from renewable sources, on top of all the other incentives for doing that.

This project could also enhance the security and decentralization of blockchain technology, because ownership of renewable energy production assets is more decentralized than e.g. ownership of money or Bitcoin mines, and building renewable energy production facilities that could overwhelm the rest of the world would be more costly, noticeable, and slow than trying to do something similar in a Proof of Stake system. If Proof of Stake’s vulnerabilities to well-resourced actors suddenly become a salient issue for many ecosystem stakeholders, planetary sustainability requires that we have ready a better system to turn to than a return to Proof of Work. Ideally, we’d be able to make an orderly transition to this new system before any such panic arises.

There are several ways in which production quantification numbers could be secured. Ideally, long-term, a governing consortia/DAO would include representatives of inverter manufacturers who would include hardware sufficient to store a unique key that can cryptographically sign generation reports, assign them to the owner’s account or designee, and support the cancelable delayed redirection of credits when the ownership of the generation facility changes hands without digital assets following. A sufficient subset of sealers who already have stake in the network could also be required to physically inspect any new facility and vouch for it, along with a fraud-challenge mechanism which could be supported by publication of generation-asset coordinate data that bounty hunters could model against e.g. weather and sometimes satellite-image data. Generation credits could be capped according to the design of an installation and existing verification & validation systems already in use for Renewable Energy Credit generation could be tapped into to help with verification steps.

The technical and consortium-building work involved is nontrivial but appears feasible.

This project helps address the climate crisis on a national-equivalent scale, while also making a blockchain that can be more decentralized and resistant to takeover than the most widely used status quo chains.

PREP can give us a better planet AND better blockchain technology. Let's make it happen!

Your support now could also be an excellent investment that helps the project grow by many times the amount of your donation beyond even the matching pool, if this research helps the project secure a larger grant, for example from the USD $94B global fund intended to support demonstrations of technology that can accelerate clean energy transitions, which was announced at the Clean Energy Ministerials in September 2022. There are a lot of grantmaking organizations whose missions are aligned with this project, but even just reading through all the details of the various opportunities and preparing an application is a serious effort, competing for the time of skilled professionals with other funded projects. Your donations now could help support the project in a way that makes that much more likely to be successful!