Making art that affects the air Part 3: The finale

And so we arrive at part 3 of the air quality NFT project – the (long awaited) culmination of my quest to create a "green" NFT.

Part one looked at the environmental impact of crypto-art, part 2 walked through the code responsible for creating it, and part 3 was supposed to be the grand "minting" of several air-quality inspired artworks that would live on the blockchain and pay their way in carbon credits.

So... where are they?

Let me explain.

You might recall that I was undecided about which blockchain to build my project on, out of options like Ethereum or Polygon/Matic. These different chains are underpinned by similar technology, but with a few key differences – most notable being their consensus mechanisms, or the way they add new blocks. Some chains, like the ever-popular bitcoin, use a method called proof of work, while others like Polygon/Matic use proof of stake (for more info on these terms, you can refer back to part 1). For our purposes, it's not so important how these work exactly, but more relevant is the fact that proof of work is super energy-intensive, and therefore worse for the environment, whereas proof of stake can use up to 99 percent less energy. It might seem like a no-brainer for a green-NFT project to go with a chain that uses proof of stake, but the vast majority of the non-fungible market exists on Ethereum, which has historically been a proof of work chain. That is until recently. Amid growing concern over the environmental impact of the crypto-sphere, the developers of Ethereum hatched a daring plan to transition the chain to using a less energy-intensive consensus mechanism, and in September 2022 the "Beacon Chain" merged with the main Ethereum branch to make the network proof of stake.

While this was good news for blockchain enthusiasts, it left me with a little problem. When testing NFT code, developers don't want to deploy their project straight to the main network, which costs them real money, so instead, many chains have "testnets" that mimic the real thing but are free for developers to use. Every time a significant change gets made to the main network, new testnets are required to reflect this, but that also means developers have to change the deploy scripts for their project, or sometimes other parts of their code to meet any new requirements. The world of crypto moves so quickly it can be difficult to keep up, and I found myself changing my project and jumping between testnets before I'd even completed a full draft. I was just about coping, but things came to a head with Ethereum's transition to proof of stake – two new testnets cropped up; Sepolia and Goerli. I chose to use Goerli, since this was the testnet favoured by OpenSea, the platform I expected I would be selling my NFT on. It made sense to go with the testnet compatible with their site since it offered me a way to check exactly how my listing would look.

Nothing too unusual so far, but then I started to see headlines like: "Testnet Ether on Goerli Skyrocketed By 673%", "Ethereum Developers to Let Goerli Testnet ‘Slowly Die’ as Coin Price Soars", and "Start of the End? Testnet Goerli Ether Spikes to $1.60 as Traders Jump on Opportunity Meant for Developers".

That's right, investors were speculating on the "free" currency of the Ethereum testnet, making it very hard to get hold of, and therefore next to impossible to actually test my project. After all that work learning the Solidity programming language, carefully crafting my code, I was being tripped up on the final hurdle.

Moving to another chain was potentially an option, but would require a lot of work, and would limit the market for selling the NFT I created. There are other proof of stake chains, but plenty are still proof of work and have no intention of changing. Bitcoin is a particularly interesting example – although it doesn't support NFTs, it does offer some broader context about the environmental impact of crypto more generally. Nearly half of the entire crypto market is in bitcoin, and bitcoin uses proof of work. By some estimates, the network uses around 15GW of electricity and "emits the same CO2 as the entire nation of Austria, according to Digiconomist"[1].

But these weren't the only issues. Even if I were able to launch my project on an environmentally friendly (minimally unfriendly?) blockchain, and I was able to test it on a relevant testnet, there's still the process of "minting" to consider. See, creating NFTs costs – you have to pay a transaction fee to the nodes that do the calculations that result in your NFT being a part of the blockchain. The more interesting and involved your project, the bigger the calculation, so the greater the fee. This takes a bite out of profit, since the project's sale price would have to recoup more than that cost to break even.

These fees can be anywhere from tens to hundreds of dollars, depending on your project, the current price of Ethereum and the number of other transactions you're competing with at the time. This makes it harder to price your project since it's not possible to say for sure what this fee will be before you mint.

After all that, we still have the problem of royalties. These were an oft-touted benefit in the early days of NFTs – the idea was that artists would get a percentage of the proceeds every time their piece was sold between collectors, not just on the first transaction. In fact, this was key to my project concept: if people continued to buy and sell the NFTs I created, that would mean the carbon offset scheme I partnered with would continue to benefit, potentially well into the future.

While this is great in concept, there are difficulties with the implementation. Currently, the payment of royalties is handled by the marketplace where the work is sold – meaning that if someone buys on one marketplace, but then transfers the piece to a different marketplace to sell, they're not bound by the same rules and can dodge having to pay the creator a cut. And it's not straightforward to fix this. Other solutions at the smart contract level have been proposed, but none has caught on properly yet.

Besides, in order for my carbon offset partner to receive any royalties, they would need a cryptocurrency wallet, and recent events have shaken faith in some of the big providers. Over the course of 2022, there were several attacks on high-profile crypto exchanges, where hackers made off with literally billions of dollars of users' funds, as well as corresponding crashes in the price of cryptocurrencies. As just one example, in November last year, cryptocurrency exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy after having been valued at $32bn just months prior, but then revealed that hackers had stolen $415 million of customers' funds.

If there's another big hack and the carbon offset scheme doesn't get its money, then my whole project fails, since I've no longer got an NFT that cleans up after itself. Not to mention that I might have trouble convincing a scheme to partner up in the first place, given these problems.

All this leads to an unavoidable question... do people even *want* NFTs anymore?

According to Google trends, the popularity of the term "NFT" is down to less than a quarter of its peak at the beginning of 2022. We're seeing countless headlines like: "The NFT market is down by almost every metric", "NFT trading volumes have tumbled 97% from their peak in January", and quotes like "In September, daily NFT trading volume on OpenSea was down nearly 99% from its May 1 peak of $405.75 million."[2].

So in short, no. People just don't want NFTs the way they used to.

And even the people that wanted NFTs might not have wanted mine.

I'm not a famous artist. I'm not well-known in the crypto-sphere. My NFT isn't tied to a physical benefit or a new currency. My project was always going to rely on buy-in from eco-conscious consumers who wanted to support the idea.

SO WHAT COULD I DO INSTEAD?

Really, buy-in isn't something I need a blockchain to create. If my ultimate goal is to reach people who care, educate them about the blockchain and create dynamic art using my air quality sensor... maybe the greenest NFT I can create is just not creating an NFT at all.

The people who would have bought a green NFT are just as likely to donate through other means, without the transaction fees and the doubts.

So. I present to you my new air-quality artwork:

(The points that are joined to form the tree rings represent air quality readings – they're plotted chronologically in a circle, starting at the top and going clockwise, with their distance from the centre representing the magnitude of the reading. The readings come from my air quality sensor, which is broadcasting to adafruit io, then my code uses their API to pick up the value. The aesthetics of the rings is randomised on each generation, to make each piece unique and beautiful.)

What the whole project now amounts to is about 5 lines of java, and a "donate here" button:

The sad truth is, after becoming nearly fluent in the language of the blockchain, I'm confident that will be more effective.

In essence, after spending a year investigating whether it's possible to make an environmentally friendly NFT, the answer is a resounding "maybe" - but perhaps it's more trouble than it's worth.

References

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/sep/15/price-carbon-emissions-ethereum-merge-make-cryptocurrency-greener
[2] https://cointelegraph.com/news/looks-bare-opensea-turns-into-nft-ghost-town-after-volume-plunges-99-in-90-days