After months of engaging with regulators and industry, one thing has become clear, MiCA’s mandatory sustainability disclosures are just the beginning. The big question now is, what comes next? What will go beyond the baseline and who will demand it? If we want real progress we need to make it easy not just to comply, but to act.

That’s where our Crypto Carbon Footprint Report comes in. It’s something we’ve been building quietly as part of Zumo Oxygen and now it’s live, I wanted to share how we got here, what it does, and why I think it’s a small but necessary step toward making crypto more accountable.

It’s a simple idea, really: if you’re offering crypto assets, you should be able to quantify the energy they use and the emissions they generate. The report takes that a step further. We’ve designed it to display both electricity energy usage and associated carbon emissions across the crypto assets a provider holds or supports. We calculate that for the service provider specifically, based on the holdings they maintain and the transactions they make (using an industry leading methodology from our incredible data partner CCRI).

But importantly, it doesn’t stop at showing the raw numbers. It also calculates how many Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) it would take to fully mitigate that footprint so you’re not just seeing the problem, you’re immediately seeing a potential path to reducing it.

It falls in to our ‘Measure’ module within our Oxygen proposition:

• Oxygen Measure – a carbon footprint calculator for crypto activity emissions,
• Oxygen Mitigate – procurement of mitigation instruments to support net-zero strategies,
• Oxygen Prove – blockchain-based proof of climate action,
• Oxygen Comply – for MiCA sustainability compliance for CASPs.

We’ve focused intentionally on electricity as a fundamental metric. Why? Because electricity is the actual resource consumed by blockchain networks. If that’s the input, then it should also be the lens through which we measure sustainability and the channel we use to mitigate impact.

But let’s be honest: this kind of data is dense. So we made a conscious decision to build the report as visually accessible as possible. You’ll see infographics, real-world comparisons (“this asset’s emissions are equivalent to X flights from London to New York”), and clear breakdowns by asset class or time period. It’s live, it’s interactive, and it’s designed for people who don’t have a PhD in carbon accounting.

One thing I’m particularly proud of is that we prototyped this in record time using generative AI (thank you lovable!). Within a few working sessions, we spun up a working web version. AI helped us sketch out visual formats, generate front-end code, and even experiment with tone and copy with stakeholders. That speed meant we could test and iterate much earlier, which saved a tonne of time and let us stay super lean in development. This has now become a standard of practice in our product org, and the more expansive gen AI becomes the more we are embracing it. I’ll be doing a tutorial in-house on AI use cases, something I will follow up later on Linkedin. Of course as expansive as the future is with gen AI, we are still developing our AI policy to cater to all of it’s nuances.

The Crypto Carbon Footprint Report isn’t a one off. It’s part of our broader Zumo Oxygen proposition, which is focused on helping the digital asset sector move toward net zero in a realistic, step by step way. MiCA gives us the base reporting requirements, ESG scrutiny, all of that. But Oxygen is about providing the carrot, tangible tools that make sustainability feel doable, not daunting. The footprint report is our “measure” tool. What’s different here is that we’re not trying to greenwash. We’re trying to make sustainability data useful. There’s a big difference between publishing a compliance document and actually enabling someone to say, “this is where my footprint is, and this is how I can shrink it.” That’s the shift we’re chasing and we’re working with incredible partners to show industry leading examples.

Let’s talk about incentives. There’s a reason sustainability matters in finance now and it’s not just because regulators say so. In the last few years, ESG investing has exploded. By 2026, ESG aligned assets under management are expected to reach $33.9 trillion globally, which would be about a fifth of all AUM worldwide (PwC). In Europe, ESG already makes up over 80% of new fund inflows (Morningstar). These aren’t niche trends anymore they’re the way capital is flowing.

For crypto, that creates a tension. Investors want exposure to digital assets, but they don’t want the environmental baggage that sometimes comes with it. They’re asking for emissions transparency at the asset level. What’s the footprint of a fund’s Bitcoin exposure? Is this exchange actively mitigating its footprint? Can I justify holding this asset to my sustainability committee?

Our report helps answer those questions, simply and credibly. It’s already being used by platforms who want to disclose their portfolio impact, and by investors trying to validate the ESG profile of a fund or instrument. If you’re building or backing crypto infrastructure in 2025, this is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s part of the playbook.

It’s not just investors using the report. Here are a few other examples we’ve seen in the wild: crypto exchanges using it to disclose the emissions profile of their supported assets (hello, MiCA compliance), ETFs and funds building carbon insights into the core ESG assessment of their digital asset exposure, wallet apps and neobanks starting to surface footprint data to users to raise awareness and offer green alternatives, compliance and ops teams trying to get ahead of regulation by generating internal reports and building a mitigation strategy early. We could see this plugging into ESG dashboards, procurement scoring, even consumer product labels.

This is still early days. The industry has a long way to go to align fully with the kinds of ESG expectations we see in traditional finance. But I’m hopeful. The appetite is there. The regulation is coming into focus. And now, finally, the tools are starting to land. If nothing else, I hope the Crypto Carbon Footprint Report gives people a reason to start the conversation inside their org “What’s our footprint? How do we manage it? How can we turn this into an advantage?”

We’re trying to set a standard that works for the long-term. I think we’ll look back in a few years and see this kind of reporting as table stakes. And I’m proud that Zumo, through Oxygen, is helping to get us there faster.

If you’re curious to see it in action, speak to our team.