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Elon Musk surprised the crypto community with his recent announcement that Tesla, which just started accepting Bitcoin (BTC) as payment a couple of months ago, will suspend accepting the crypto due to environmental concerns. While BTC is no longer an option, he also hinted that the electric carmaker might be choosing another digital currency.
The announcement sparked speculations which crypto might by replacing Bitcoin. Here are some of the potential replacements that would comply with Musk’s requirement of using less than 1% of Bitcoin’s energy per transaction, according to Cointelegraph.
While Ethereum currently consumes an estimated 62.56 KWh per transaction, that issue will be resolved with the transition to ETH 2.0, which will introduce Proof-of-Stake (POS). ETH 2.0 is expected to be significantly more efficient than the current one as PoS is estimated to be 99 percent more energy-efficient than the current Proof-of-Work (PoW) model. This would also mean that PoS chains such as Solana and Cardano would meet Musk’s energy-efficiency requirement.
Ripple (XRP) is also a potential BTC replacement for Tesla. This is because all XRP tokens have been pre-mined and transactions only use 0.0079 kWh.
Stellar Lumens (XLM) is another option as its tokens are also pre-mined like XRP. Authentication of transactions uses the Stellar Consensus Protocol (SCP), which is said to require lesser energy compared to PoW and PoS.
Tesla might also consider Algorand as another potential replacement for Bitcoin. The team already made an announcement that the blockchain became fully carbon-neutral on April 22, 2021.
Dogecoin has long been one of Elon Musk’s favorite crypto, which makes it another option. Dogecoin is mined using Scrypt, which is also energy efficient. DOGE transaction is estimated to use 0.12 kWh per transaction.
There were even speculations even before Musk announced Tesla’s suspension of Bitcoin payments that the electric car manufacturer might add DOGE as a payment option. He created a Twitter poll asking users if they want Tesla to accept Dogecoin as a payment with 78.1 percent of the participants giving a positive response.
