# Banking on Blockchain: Costs Savings Thanks to the Blockchain Technology
## 1 Introduction  
Today, sustainable development, green house gas effects and climate change are among the major challenges faced by the mankind, and many organizations, such as financial institutions, are looking to both save money and reduce their carbon footprint. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is an essential factor in tackling these challenges. However, if, on the one hand, ICT can help to reduce energy and resource consumption, on the other hand, its ever-increasing usage induces rising demands for energy and resources. The cost of running an IT Infrastructure goes well beyond the cost of acquisition and manpower. It comprises the cost of powering the whole system, and depends heavily on computer software and software process models. There are three main impacts of ICT on the environment (see work by [1]):  
_\"First-order impacts are environmental effects that result from production and use of ICT, i.e., resource use and pollution from mining, hardware production, power consumption during usage, and disposal of electronic equipment waste.\"_  
_\"Second-order impacts are effects that result indirectly from using ICT, like energy and resource conservation by process optimization (dematerialization effects), or resource conservation by substitution of material products with their immaterial counterparts (substitution effects).\"__\"Third-order impacts are long-term indirect effects on the environment that result from ICT usage, like changing life styles that promote faster economic growth and, at worst, outweigh the formerly achieved savings (rebound effects). These effects do not appear sequentially and disconnected. In reality they are nested, which means that second-order effects can only emerge on the basis of first-order effects and third-order effects can only appear as ramifications of second-order effects.\"_  
Effective sustainability initiatives are needed as soon as possible, and environmental sustainability shall play a key role in doing business responsibly and successfully. Up to now, much effort has been spent to address the environmental aspects of sustainability of computer hardware, but there is much to do in the field of computer software, and software process models. A software product, \"Green and Sustainable\", should have an economic, societal, and ecological impact, and an impact on human beings as small as possible over its whole life cycle. However, such a software product can be achieved only if all the various stakeholders recognize these impacts, and the whole developing organization is aware of negative and positive impacts that the usage of the software product will likely cause over its whole life cycle. In past years, many organizations have launched sustainability market initiative to improve environmental performance and environmental management. In addition, many banks are experimenting with the blockchain technology, betting on its ability to promote economic growth by freeing up trade, in order to speed up the rate of technological innovation, and its ability to lead to faster development of green technologies (see work by [2]). The introduction of blockchain technology may provide substantial energy savings if it may take the place of some of the energy consumptive systems, services and locations that support the fiat currency [3]. Blockchain technology seems to have the potentiality to optimize the global financial infrastructure, dealing with global issues, such as sustainable development, or with asset transfers much more efficiently than current financial systems. The financial sector incurs in many operative costs in order to efficiently run the whole system. These costs include time and money required to invest heavily in infrastructure, electricity costs to operate and from automated teller machines (ATMs), gas and water consumed by employees and waste produced. In addition, no fiat currency can be created without costs.