The report stresses that “The Merge,” a foundational change in Ethereum’s consensus mechanism, reduced energy demand by 3.5 orders of magnitude, scaling down a network that required energy equivalent to a small nation-state like Iceland before the new proof-of-stake consensus change.
Cambridge Report Reveals Ethereum’s Energy Consumption Dropped 99.98% Post-Merge
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Key Takeaways
- Cambridge released a report detailing Ethereum’s massive energy efficiency gains following the 2022 Merge.
- The network’s annual power demand dropped to 7.87 GWh, causing total emissions to plummet by nearly 99.98%.
- Ethereum now consumes a tiny fraction of the energy required by legacy banking systems and global platforms.
Cambridge Center Highlights Ethereum Post-Merge Achievements in New Report
Analysts are still scrutinizing the behavior of Ethereum, one of the largest smart contract platforms, after one of the most relevant pivots in its history.
The Cambridge Center for Alternative Finance issued the “Ethereum after the Merge: A Change in Power” report in June, examining the advances and the effects that the change had on network dynamics.
The report found dramatic energy consumption changes after ‘The Merge,’ the name that was given to the change in consensus mechanism that Ethereum experienced on 15 September 2022. The center states that the pre-merge Ethereum energy demand climbed to 2.4 GW, the demand of a nation-state the size of Iceland.
Nonetheless, this changed after the event, reducing its power demand by 3.5 orders of magnitude, taking this number to 7.87 GWh per year, equivalent to roughly 0.90 MW per day.
Cambridge estimates are based on a network-weighted average of 105 watts per node, numbers that set it well below competitors like Solana, which reaches over 13.4 GWh per year, but above NEAR, which registers 5.11 GWh per year.
“Taken together, the two measures show that while Ethereum is one of the larger consumers in absolute terms, it is comparatively efficient relative to its economic weight,” the center highlighted.
In comparison, the Ethereum network’s footprint reaches half of what the British Museum needs, and only a fraction of what global platforms like Netflix need to operate, roughly equivalent to the energy the Eiffel Tower consumes.
The report also established a comparison with traditional financial networks, estimating that the legacy banking system- including data centers, branches, and ATM infrastructure- used 260 TWh per year. “Against this benchmark, Ethereum’s 7.87 GWh (0.0079 TWh) footprint is about 4.5 orders of magnitude smaller, a ratio of roughly 33,000 to one,” the report assessed.
Emissions also fell from 10.3 MtCO₂ to 2.37 ktCO₂e, a reduction of nearly 99.98% achieved with a single architecture software change.
