1. Introduction

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In 2009, Satoshi Nakamoto invented an alternative store of value never before seen in human history. In the next decade, his creation, Bitcoin, has secured its place as the hardest form of money in the new digital economy and the foundation of a new open, global financial system. Bitcoin changed the world; however, there has always been one complaint about Satoshi’s breakthrough - its energy cost.

Whenever we are talking about Bitcoin or Proof of Work, its “Consensus“ can definitely be defined as a “competitive money burning process”. Every time a transaction is added to the ledger, miners are racing to solve the puzzle and win a reward; however, only one of them wins. When a block is found, the process starts over. It is definitely not the perfect system, but it’s the most efficient one the world has witnessed so far. 

 

The crypto space never takes a day off. Things constantly evolve and do so at a rapid pace. Legacy networks in the space now face issues that have to do with their established modus operandi. More and more people are challenging the decentralized nature of Bitcoin; just a few days ago, Elon Musk, who turned from a Bitcoin bull to the cryptocurrency’s most avid critic overnight, tweeted that “Bitcoin is actually highly centralized, with supermajority controlled by handful of big mining (aka hashing) companies.” He supported this statement by citing the recent coal mine flood accident in Xinjiang, China, as a result of which Bitcoin’s hash rate dropped 35%.

 

And it’s not just the decentralization that has been a bone of contention lately. Just three months ago, in February, Musk’s Tesla announced that it would start accepting Bitcoin payments for electric vehicle purchases. Simultaneously, it also became clear that the company had invested $1.5 billion in Bitcoin. Needless to say, the market reacted positively to the news. However, last week, Musk backtracked on Tesla’s announcement, revealing that eventually, the company had suspended vehicle purchases with Bitcoin, citing environmental concerns, namely the increasing use of fossil fuels for the cryptocurrency’s mining needs.

 

Having said that, it is obvious that there are fundamental problems that the crypto space needs to address, if it wants to accelerate the adoption rate and live up to its promise to give power to the people over their finances.

 

We at ChainGreen, as crypto enthusiasts and true believers in the potential of blockchain technology, think that the access to blockchain and cryptocurrency projects should be democratized so that basically everyone who has hard drive storage to spare will have the opportunity to take part in the validation of transactions without further exacerbating his/her own carbon footprint. Crypto can be smart, simple, and, most importantly, green and highly decentralized.

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2. Company Vision

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ChainGreen - the Eco-Friendly Bitcoin Alternative

Our team was initially inspired by the outstanding technical work and idea of the Chia Network project, which focuses on an energy-efficient blockchain that aims to make mining accessible to everyone and be significantly less damaging to the environment. Given the recent concerns about Bitcoin’s energy consumption, mixed with our belief that there is always a better/smarter way to achieve results, we decided that we want to be a part of the solution.

 

The Chia Network created their native currency driven by the belief that “cryptocurrency should be easier to use than cash, harder to lose, and nearly impossible to steal”. We cannot agree more with this, we just see a different way to arrive at the desired destination thanks to Chaingreen.

In general, mining requires rigs that consume significant amounts of energy and require additional infrastructure investments, such as hardware, broadband connectivity, and other essential components, which together contribute to an overall high carbon footprint. This is what Chaingreen wants to disrupt and by doing so, to debunk the myth that cryptocurrencies cannot be green.

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Value Proposition and Vision

It will take many years (21 to be exact) for the rest of the network participants to farm as much of Chia (XCH) cryptocurrency as the company behind it received from Chia genesis block. This is where we see an opportunity for improvement and a more efficient and fair way of achieving the initial goal of Chia. As the name implies, Chaingreen is a “green” alternative to the popular consensus algorithm, Proof of Work, and a more secure and decentralized alternative to Proof of Stake, based on the so-called Proof of Space and Time (PoST) algorithm implemented by Chia creator Bram Cohen.

 

ChainGreen will ensure that the majority of the economic value generated by the platform is fairly distributed to its community to create a more equitable allocation of resources, meaning that NO amount of coins will be pre-mined/pre-farmed, therefore there will be no strategic reserve, which is the case with Chia.

 

As per definition, pre-mining is the creation of a certain amount of cryptocurrency before the digital currency is available to the public. Usually, the “pre-mined” coins are used to award developers, ICO holders, and anyone that helped with the inception of a project.

 

We see a lot of disadvantages of this initial issuing of rewards for the original team that is hardcoded in the blockchain, as we think that pre-mining mainly serves the creators of the coins themselves and gives them too much control over their own cryptocurrency, thereby generating distrust among users. In theory, the pre-mined coins can be set aside by the initial contributors of the network before the official release. In the case of a rise in the coin’s price, those pre-mined coins can be taken back to the market, causing a decline in the fair market price and damaging outsiders.

 

Another aspect that differentiates us from the Chia project is our Emission schedule.

 

We believe in total decentralization and our developers are able to farm in the same way network participants can, without being prioritized in any way. We are enthusiastic about this technology and believe that ChainGreen can become the eco-friendly “Bitcoin” used for global transactions and means of payment. 

 

In simplest terms, ChainGreen is essentially a soft fork of Chia that has no pre-mining and no infinite supply as opposed to the Chia project. 

 

ChainGreen’s mainnet will be launched on May 19, 2021 for both farming block rewards and making transactions on the chain.

 

The project is fully funded by the community and does not rely on third party investments. The project and its ethics and initiatives are not subject to external influences, be it financial or structural, or in any other form.

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3. PoW/PoS vs PoST

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The ChainGreen Network relies upon the so-called “New Nakamoto Consensus” algorithm called Proof of Space аnd Proof of Time (PoST). These new methods are created with the idea that they should not be consuming such significant amounts of electricity.

 

• Proof of Work (PoW) cryptocurrencies burn huge amounts of electricity. Furthermore, they tend to become centralized due to the concentration of hardware manufacturing and ownership and concentration of cheap energy, making PoW inaccessible to ordinary users and susceptible to various attacks. 

• On the other hand, Proof of Stake (PoS) has many forms, each with its own pros and cons. Some common weaknesses are: concentrated control of funds by exchanges; concentration of delegation; reliance on checkpoints and subjectivity (a requirement to be online periodically); inaccessibility to regular users; slashing risk; clock synchronization assumptions, networking assumptions, and other security assumptions.

• Proof of Space - Chia has previously articulated its technical vision, the so-called PoST consensus model. This paper outlines Chia’s vision for sustainability and this is something ChainGreen closely relates to. 

 

Proof of Space    

As per the Chia Proof of Space Construction, a Proof of Space protocol is one in which:

• a Verifier can send a challenge to a Prover, and 

• the Prover can demonstrate to the Verifier that the Prover is reserving a specific amount of storage space at that precise time. 

 

The Proof of Space protocol has three components: plotting, proving/farming, and verifying. 

• Plotting - the process by which a prover, who we refer to as a “farmer”, initializes a certain amount of space. A farmer can be any person who has at least 239 GiB (or 256 GB) available to reserve on their laptop, or an enterprise prepared to allocate a large volume of unused storage space. There is no upper limit. Plotting takes on the order of hours or days, and is performed only once. The initialized space is occupied by a file called a “plot”. Creating plots takes some time and CPU power.  One can move plots from one machine to another without any restrictions. Some people build dedicated plotting machines that are optimized to perform the plotting process quickly, and then move the plots to a less powerful machine to perform the harvesting.

• Farming - Farming is the process in which a farmer receives a sequence of challenges to prove that they have legitimately put aside a defined amount of storage. In response to each challenge, the farmer checks their plots, generates a proof and submits any winning proofs to the network for verification. 

• Verifying - after the farmer has successfully created a proof of space, the proof can be verified by performing a few hashes and making comparisons between the x-values in the proof.

Proof of Time 

ChainGreen will be using Chia’s innovative PoST consensus algorithm, which is an attempt to improve on PoW-based blockchains with a new twist. Instead of consuming massive amounts of electricity and wasteful single-purpose ASIC hardware to validate transactions, Proof of Space leverages the over-provisioned exabytes of disk space that already exist in the world today.

 

Proof of Time requires actual “wall clock” time to pass between blocks. Proof of Time is implemented by a Verifiable Delay Function (VDF) that takes a certain amount of time to compute but is very fast to verify. The key idea of a VDF is that it requires sequential computation, so having many parallel machines or

CPUs/GPUs/ASICs (as in PoW mining) does not create a benefit, and therefore electricity waste is minimized. 

 

For more technical details please check here.

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How to Start Farming ChainGreen
To become a ChainGreen “farmer”, a user first needs to make sure they have enough free storage space on a hard drive or SSD. Then the future network participant can download ChainGreen’s desktop client from here, which will store cryptographic numbers on their hard disk into plots. This is the most energy-consuming part of the farming and will take a few hours. Once the plotting is done, the software will start farming in the background - the energy consumption and bandwidth use will immediately go down. Consequent block rewards can be tracked in the above-mentioned desktop client.

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4. Emission schedule

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CGN - ChainGreen’s token ticker

Farming rewards will create new ChainGreen tokens (CGN) once the ChainGreen network is launched. A “farmer” can “plot” over-provisioned hard drive space to prove that a certain amount of space is available to the network.

 

The network will have a limited supply of 6 675 120 000 CGN tokens and once farmers have unlocked this number, the supply will be exhausted. Initially, there will be 4,608 block rewards a day and one of these plots will “farm” 500 CGNs every 18.75 seconds. The block rewards are cut in half every 4 years, following the same halving model as Bitcoin’s.
After the total amount of CGN coins is minted, rewards will only be generated from transaction fees.

ChainGreen’s worth will be determined by the supply and demand market powers.

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5. Project funding

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The project is funded mostly by donations and in-house CGN farming. 50% of our endowment is used for software development, 30% is used for infrasructure and 20% will be used for community activities. The founding team will be contributing to the project at least until 2025.

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6. Executive team

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Mio Sukakura
With us since our founding, Mio is one of our veteran team members. He brings his 10+ years of experience and skills to the forefront in helping the organization grow and succeed in developing sustainable and eco-responsible projects.
 

Yakoshiba Momiti
Yakoshiba joined ChainGreen with the vision and drive to improve upon our mission to create low energy consumption and sustainable blockchain products. His passions include protecting the environment and building awesome software products.

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Nasakoto Y.
Nasakoto is truly a professional, who has found his purpose with ChainGreen. Supporting multiple environmental causes as well as developing kick-ass marketing strategies, Nasakoto is a lead member of our team.