.gems’ mission is to onboard artists onto the blockchain, help them publish their art as NFTs and do so in an environmentally sustainable way.
In fact, .gems’ parent company, EOS Nation, has been a leading block producer in charge of processing transactions and securing the environmentally friendly delegated-proof-of-stake (DPoS) EOS & WAX blockchain networks since 2018 & 2019 respectively. EOS Nation’s creation in 2018 was based on the premise that highly efficient and environmentally friendly delegated-proof-of-stake networks would eventually become very attractive for a wide range of use cases.
In 2020, Stéphane Bisson, Co-founder and Chief Community Officer of EOS Nation and Martin Breuer, Regional Director of Asia and EOS Nation’s first employee, started the .gems NFT Studio & Creative Agency in anticipation of a surge of demand from artists looking to publish their art on environmentally-conscious blockchain networks.
As .gems only publishes NFTs on the EOS & WAX networks, artists and collectors can be assured that our NFTs are not negatively impacting the environment when being created, or when being transferred or traded on secondary markets.
On top of that, and due to the highly efficient design of these DPoS networks, WAX and EOS can offer feeless transactions to their users, allowing a great user-experience for collectors as they trade or interact with NFTs, without having to worry about annoying and sometimes prohibitive gas fees found on other networks.
When people claim that blockchain networks, and the NFTs that live on them, are energy-hungry and bad for the environment, they’re talking about proof-of-work blockchain networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum. They’re not talking about DPoS blockchain networks such as EOS & WAX. On Bitcoin and Ethereum, network energy consumption increases as the networks grow in value and activity. Conversely, on the EOS & WAX networks, the energy consumption is relatively stable regardless of the growth in value or activity. That means that new NFT series published on EOS or WAX do not cause a noticeable or impactful increase in energy consumption.
Want to learn more about the technical details and differences between proof-of-work and delegated-proof-of-stake? Here’s some further reading material:
First of all, we encourage our curious readers to read this article written in December 2018 by Block.one, the creators of the EOSIO open-source blockchain software that is leveraged by both EOS & WAX. In this article, Block.one demonstrates that environmental considerations have been at the forefront of these networks since 2018, well before the recent NFT surge.
The WAX team released a similar article this month detailing the current power consumption of the WAX network and the results are stunning. WAX is currently 125,000 times more efficient than Ethereum and the NFTs so far minted on WAX have already saved over 4 million tons of carbon emissions compared to if they were minted on Ethereum. To top that off, the WAX team also announced a new partnership with National Forest Foundation, a respected non-profit organization focused on reforestation. Soon enough you’ll be able to buy carbon-credit NFTs on WAX which, when “composted,” the National Forest Foundation will commit to planting 1 tree for each dollar of value of the purchased and composted NFT, making it easy for artists and collectors to completely offset their (already very small) blockchain-carbon-footprint.
If you’re still not sold on the environmental benefits of EOS and WAX, we encourage you to watch and share this wonderful video created by the WAX team that recaps many of the concepts explained here and in the linked articles in an easily digestible way for artists and collectors that may not yet be familiar with the intricacies of different blockchain networks. Note that the same video applies to EOS as it’s built on the same EOSIO blockchain technology as WAX.
We hope you learned something in this article and we encourage you to reach out to us on Twitter, Telegram or Discord if you have more technical questions about our NFTs and the blockchain networks on which they live. Share your questions with us, we love talking about this stuff! 🤓