The Ergo platform intends to make it simple, safe, and efficient to create financial contracts that are both beneficial and long-lasting. Ergo bills itself as a self-modifying protocol that can supposedly absorb new ideas and enhance itself in a decentralized manner.Ergo creates and validates new coins via a mining technique similar to Bitcoin. However, because it restricts the scale of the machines that can mine, there's no risk of the same carbon-intensive mining farms that we saw with Bitcoin.Ergo, like Ethereum, is a programmable blockchain. This implies it can host decentralized apps, among other things (dApps). It does not, however, incur gas (transaction) costs, unlike Ethereum.