PayPal is promoting incentives for bitcoin miners who take steps to reduce their operations' environmental impacts.

The PayPal Blockchain Research Group, in tandem with non-profit EnergyWeb, has developed a clean energy validation platform to monitor and reward less energy-intensive bitcoin mining operations, PayPal said Monday in a blog. The solution’s development comes as bitcoin generation puts immense strain on local electrical grids and taxpayers in the U.S., according to critics.

Bitcoin mining is a process in which people called “miners” solve cryptographic puzzles to create new blocks of transactions on a cryptocurrency's blockchain, with the fastest miners earning bitcoins for their work. To solve those puzzles quickly, miners use large, energy-guzzling computers. 

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