Zumo’s Kirsteen Harrison on nuances of Bitcoin sustainability

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The “power-hungry” nature of digital assets has been an easy target for Bitcoin skeptics over the years. From the International Monetary Fund and the United Nations to legislators and industry leaders, skeptics have propagated the “Bitcoin’s energy demands are unsustainable” narrative, inevitably leading to a call for bans or other restrictive policies. In an interview with CoinGeek Backstage, Zumo’s Kirsteen Harrison delved into the nuances of the energy consumption of the digital asset sector and why these blanket statements purposely mislead the masses.

Harrison is the director of sustainability at Zumo, an Edinburgh, Scotland-based company that offers digital asset solutions, but with a strong focus on sustainability and compliance. The award-winning company, which has raised $32 million in seven funding rounds, is registered as a virtual asset service provider (VASP) with the U.K.’s FCA.

As a digital asset intermediary, Zumo knew early on that it had an obligation to consider the sector’s carbon footprint, especially since a sizable portion of its client base is institutional investors and corporations. This birthed Oxygen, a “done-for-you enterprise service that allows you to tackle the environmental impact of your digital asset holdings.”

Oxygen targets institutional investors and asset managers who seek to align their digital asset investments with ESG principles. It also caters to exchanges, wallets, banks, fintechs, and other intermediaries.

“We work with them to quantify [their energy consumption and carbon footprint] and apportion it, and then we work with them to mitigate against that through the procurement of renewable energy certificates and to prove that on the blockchain, too.”

Harrison participated in a panel at the London Blockchain Conference that discussed how to embed sustainability at the heart of the digital asset ETF revolution. The company played a key role in the launch of Europe’s first ESG-aligned spot BTC ETF, by Jacobi Asset Management.

Harrison, who has been in the sustainability sector for well over two decades, believes that the nuances of the digital asset sector’s energy consumption are not taken into account. For instance, critics always reduce everything to one electricity consumption figure, which tends to paint the sector as power-hungry without a matching economic impact.

However, this oversimplification can be a strength for the sector, she told CoinGeek Backstage host Becky Liggero.

“The fact that we can point easily to that number, which is our carbon footprint, means that we can take action to reduce it through the use of renewable energy.”

Yet another nuance that is rarely highlighted is the utility of Bitcoin. Other related sectors, such as traditional finance, assess their environmental impact based on their utility, not the raw input. The aviation sector, for instance, consumes 2,500 TWh annually and is responsible for 2.5% of global CO₂ emissions, nearly twenty times that of the digital asset sector. However, its utility and impact on the global economy justify this raw energy use.

Adding to the nuances is the utility of individual blockchains. Some, like BTC and Ethereum, have remained limited to a handful of transactions per second, which makes them only useful for the elite and the speculators. BSV, however, scales unbounded, facilitating thousands of transactions per second. With the Teranode upgrade early next year, the network will process over a million transactions per second, making it the only enterprise-ready blockchain network globally.

In recent years, the energy consumption debate has taken to bashing proof-of-work and advocating for proof-of-stake as the improved consensus mechanism. However, PoS deviates from the decentralization ethos of blockchain technology, handing the power of providing consensus to a small group of elites with the most tokens. Even then, it still doesn’t scale for enterprise use, as Ethereum has proven.

As Satoshi Nakamoto designed it, BSV has proven that proof-of-work scales unboundedly for global use with the lowest fees and a stable protocol while still being energy-efficient.

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