Non-Compensatory Security and Utility Gates for Blockchain Lifecycle Assessment: Framework Development and an Operational-Energy Application to the Ethereum Merge

Environmental comparisons of blockchain systems are often reduced to electricity per transaction, although operational services also depend on validators, cloud gateways, storage, monitoring, key management, recovery, and hardware replacement. This study develops a lifecycle assessment framework with non-compensatory security and utility gates and applies its operational-energy module to Ethereum’s transition from proof of work (PoW) to proof of stake (PoS). Three units are separated: 24 h of observed network operation (FU-O), 24 h of fully security- and utility-qualified service (FU-Q), and one million included layer-1 transactions (FU-B, an attributional diagnostic). FU-Q is not evaluated because several mandatory gates remain UNRESOLVED. Matched 28-day activity windows are combined with dated network-energy estimates, not continuous metering over those windows. Using the independent Cambridge baseline, daily operational electricity decreased from 58,617.39 to 5.376 MWh, a factor of 10,903.5 and a reduction of 99.99083%. The CCRI replication factor was 8804.9, while an adverse bounded pairing still yielded a factor of 3424.7. Across 100,000 Monte Carlo realizations generated by the supplied executable workflow, the median FU-O reduction was 99.98698%, with a central 95% interval of 99.97492–99.99441%. Jansen sensitivity analysis identified post-Merge annual energy as the dominant input to the FU-O factor. The additional post-Merge cloud and annualized embodied burden required to eliminate FU-O parity was 21,408 GWh/year. The result is a bounded operational-energy application and does not establish the complete lifecycle, cloud, cybersecurity, or functional-equivalence framework.