Commercial Liability and Environmental Harm in Crypto Markets: Rethinking ESG, Fiduciary Duty, and Transnational Governance

This dataset accompanies the article Commercial Liability and Environmental Harm in Crypto Markets, which analyzes the legal and regulatory gaps surrounding the environmental externalities of cryptocurrency markets—particularly those driven by Bitcoin’s proof-of-work (PoW) mining mechanism. The study draws on publicly available data from the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index (CBECI) to identify structural breaks in Bitcoin’s annual electricity consumption between 2010 and 2025. These regime shifts—correlated with speculative bubbles, regulatory interventions, and ESG investor pressure—highlight the legal inadequacies of current commercial, fiduciary, and ESG frameworks in internalizing ecological harms. This Zenodo record contains only the derived analytical outputs and code (e.g., breakpoint detection results using the Pruned Exact Linear Time (PELT) method, figures, and summary tables). The original CBECI dataset is not redistributed here due to copyright restrictions. Interested researchers may obtain the underlying dataset from the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance at: https://ccaf.io/cbeci/index.