Today's world is seriously ill and our intention is to leave it to our children better than we found it.
In order to do this, we have to commit ourselves, as individuals, without waiting for ecological policies that might arrive when it is too late.
We at Trusty care about this, and today we are going to tell you what we are doing to offset the impact of our platform.
At Trusty we make sure that the information that is provided to consumers is guaranteed to be true to the date on which it was declared. The focus on this data is resolved through the use of various Blockchain solutions and, in some cases, Distributed Ledger Technology.
Unfortunately, and we would certainly like to say the opposite, these technologies, with their many plus points for ensuring transparency and veracity in data, have a strong environmental impact.
In light of the news that fills the internet about the energy consumption of Blockchain technology, we at Trusty try to keep an environmentally friendly approach as much as possible. Driven by the need to be transparent, we have decided to write this article with the aim of communicating how we use these technologies.
Before going into details, let us tell you how Trusty uses the Blockchain.
Trusty is a Software as a Service platform that helps manufacturers improve consumer experience and engagement through comprehensive sharing of raw material and product ingredient provenance data, travelling along the entire supply-chain via a simple scan of a QR-Code.
To certify and make immutable the information entered on a production batch, Trusty uses Blockchain technology through different approaches to meet the different needs of companies (from the registration of each individual event in smart contracts to a simple notarisation of the whole batch).
It is potentially possible to record information declared through the GS1 EPCIS Standard on any permissioned or permissionless Blockchain platform.
In the most popular approach, the creation of a time stamp (notarisation) of the information related to a batch takes place on the Bitcoin Blockchain. The notarisation process, in this case, starts with the generation of a PDF file that contains all the declared traceability information for each batch. The PDF is notarised through an open source protocol called OpenTimestamp.
The protocol allows the date and time of a transaction to be associated with the document and does so by aggregating the unique identifier associated with the document (hash) with thousands of other documents. The method used is based on a method known as merkle-tree which, on the basis of a series of information contained in a file (.ots), makes it possible to uniquely reconstruct the presence of the document within the transaction.
Why does Trusty take such a light approach in the most widespread approach?
Having such a Light approach allows us to democratise access to Blockchain technology by initially addressing the challenges and complexities of digitisation in the agri-food sector and then, once onboarding is complete, to explore new approaches with Smart Contract and Identity.
The choice and use of the OpenTimestamp protocol mentioned above allows us to reduce the energy footprint of the Trusty platform. Its operation ensures that the PDF document, once transformed into a hash, aggregates with other evidence. The transaction is only ready to be notarised in the Blockchain when the OpenTimestamp protocol reaches a certain quota of evidence (typically 50,000). This aggregation approach keeps the energy consumption for each notarization low: considering that the consumption of a Bitcoin transaction today is 1570 kWh(source here), it turns out that for each single notarization of the PDF approximately 0.0314 kWh is consumed and thus 0.0149 kg of CO2.
Not bad considering that an Italian emits 2.325 kg of CO2(here is the source used for the calculation) by simply consuming 1 GB of mobile network from his smartphone.
🌳 🌳 Where we do not arrive we compensate
Trusty tries to be as committed as possible to the environment and for this reason we have decided to offset the impact of these transitions by planting trees with Treedom .
Through Treedom, after calculating the carbon dioxide emissions produced by our notarisations, we decide how many trees to plant in order to make the use of the platform zero impact for the environment and for our customers.
We have decided to create a forest of cocoa trees (for now) and we will tell you why in future articles. In the meantime you can see our trees here.
In the next few posts, we will tell you how we use blockchain in solutions that require more widespread notarisation. Follow us.
To implement 🖐 Trusty in your company. contact us here.
