CryptO2

Inspiration

One of the major problems facing cryptocurrencies today is the environmental impact. Most prominently, the carbon footprint of cryptocurrency transactions may not be initially apparent to people. Using concrete real-world data, this web application expresses in a tangible way just how much impact a user's cryptocurrency transactions have in their carbon footprint, so they can make informed decisions based on how their actions will affect the environment.

What it does

This web app visualises the Carbon Footprint and Electrical Energy Consumption a crypto currency account produces by calculating in real-time from real-world data.

How we built it

Data Collection

Number of transactions and gas used per day from Etherscan
Ethereum Energy Consumption Index: https://digiconomist.net/ethereum-energy-consumption/
Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption/ We compiled all of this data with the pandas and numpy Data Science libraries

Framework

Language: Python 3 Web app: Django Data querying: pandas

Challenges we ran into

The collection of up-to-date, accurate data was the biggest challenge. There were no useful datasets that appear with a simple Google search - what we had to do was look at pre-compiled statistics and find where their sources are. Eventually, we found Digiconomist, Blockchain Explorer and Etherscan as reliable, free sources of data that we require for our project.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

As a proof of concept, we compiled a chart showing the energy consumption for a single transaction plotted against time. It helped show that the increasing concerns about the environmental impact of cryptocurrency mining are well justified.

What's next for CryptO2

There are many things we can develop further, for example, we could calculate carbon footprint per year and suggest ways of mitigating their carbon footprint, for example, using more environmentally friendly currencies or reducing the number of transactions the user performs.

We have purchased the cryptotwo.tech domain from domain.com, but got access to the control panel too late to set anything except a basic dud site

Built With

Submitted to

Hack Cambridge Atlas

Created by

Gathered and processed the data and connected it to the backend, also implemented queries to external APIs

spdskatr ~
I worked on setting up the server side, so that all that was necessary was to plug in the calculation code and the html page and it would work. I'd never done this before, so started with the Flask Starter kit. This was full of errors, as it did not specify what version of python to use and so I probably didn't find the right one. After some time we decided to give up and move to Django, which went very smoothly

Alec Keir-Bucknall
Private user
Zhiyi Liu