“Permissionless” means that new information can be added by anyone (“miners” or “validators”) fulfilling the technical requirements using a computerised process that validates transactions (“consensus mechanism”). Depending on the underlying consensus mechanism, mining and validation of some crypto-assets requires a lot of computing power, which makes the process very energy-intensive.
For example, crypto-assets like Bitcoin have an energy consumption comparable to that of a medium-sized country like Spain. [21] Despite these technological differences, crypto-assets have features in common with the traditional financial system: trading on market places and exchanges, provision of payments services, lending, or use of collateral in financial transactions. Two types of crypto-assets are relevant: The first are “native” tokens.