For most people, crypto has been synonymous with Bitcoin. Those with some Bitcoin savvy know the technology relies on “proof of work” to validate transactions. This requires significant CPU and GPU resources. Other blockchains pursue different roles using different validation methods. Increasingly, “proof of space”, which validates operations with participants’ excess storage capacity, provides an approach that may be both greener and rife with opportunity for organizations to derive revenue from their IT infrastructure.
Storage-centric blockchains are indeed seen as a more energy-efficient alternative to the blockchains that depend on proof of work. This is the case because the storage-enabled currencies lack the power-hungry transactions. According to a United States Data Center Energy Report, storage typically only amounts to 11% of data centers’ power.
An example of storage-centric crypto is Protocol Labs’ Filecoin. It uses “proof of space and time” for blockchain validation and similarly rewards miners in FIL currency. The storage miners make their unused capacity available to the network. Given the enormous amount of capacity pledged to Filecoin, a mining entity can archive a great deal of data, which frees up its local capacity for other, more critical use. Chia is another well-known example of storage-centric currency.