Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum believes that Dogecoin and ZCash can follow popular cryptocurrencies and go green. September marks a historic event in the blockchain industry, including Ethereum’s long-awaited green upgrade, known as the Merge. Recoding the Ethereum blockchain from an energy-consuming Proof-of-Work (PoW) mechanism to a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) model reduced its power consumption by 99.95 percent. Being power-intensive, many popular blockchains, including Bitcoin, are being urged to adopt cleaner operations.
“I would say that … as PoS matures, I expect it to grow in legitimacy over time. I hope @zcash moves forward and I hope @dogecoin moves to PoS soon,” Mesari crypto market intelligence firm quoted Buterin was saying in an interview.
Launched in December 2013 and October 2016, the Dogecoin and ZCash cryptocurrencies are based on the Litecoin and Bitcoin blockchains, respectively.
Both blockchains use an energy-consuming PoW mechanism. To be as environmentally friendly as Ethereum’s merge upgrade, these blockchains need to be recoded into a PoS mechanism.
PoW mining requires a competitive authentication method to confirm transactions and add new blocks to the blockchain. Hence, PoW mining is more expensive to maintain. Meanwhile, PoS mining operations use randomly selected miners to validate transactions to keep the process running without the use of advanced computers.
Just one day after the merger went live on September 15, Dogecoin emerged as the second largest PoW cryptocurrency after Bitcoin. PoW cryptocurrencies Ethereum Classic (ETC), Litecoin (LTC), and Monero (XMR) followed BTC and DOGE in third, fourth, and fifth place, respectively.
However, the idea of ZCash and Dogecoin going green is not new. According to a CryptoPotato ReportBoth Dogecoin and Zcash have developers According to reports Expressed interest in the idea of transitioning to PoS.
