WePower has managed to draw up quite a bit of interest and hype with their blockchain-based green energy trading platform, despite the crowded ICO landscape that currently exists. Let's take a look at their team, technology and business proposition to see if they're worthy of it.
Team
Nikolaj Martyniuk - C0-founder and CEO, has been in the energy business for almost 10 years, having spent most of his time as the CEO of Modus Energy
Artūras Asakavičius - Co-founder, lawyer, having spent most have his career thus far at Sorainen, a well-known law firm in Lithuania, as well as in Estonia and Latvia
Kaspar Kaarlep - CTO, having spent most of his career at Elektrilevi in various positions, including the CTO. They are an electricity supper in the Baltic states.
Heikki Kolk - Advisor & Solution architect, having spent 10 years at Elektrilevi.
Jon Matonis - Advisor, director of Bitcoin Foundation
They have lots of other well-known advisors and backers as well. They're backed by StartupBootcamp. They also recently garnered a 7-figure investment from LDJ Cayman Fund Ltd, a well known company with a history of backing prestigious cryptocurrency projects. Overall they look to have a very solid team with enough financial backing to get this project off the ground and running
Business model
They intend to allow green energy producers to raise captial by issuing their own energy tokens which can be traded or sold on their platform for anytime. As demand increases, so does the value of the token. Producers are committed to produce that energy at some point in the future, and allows these producers to sell the energy directly to the buyers by reducing upfront capital costs, a major issue given that most of the capital required for green energy investment comes in the form of upfront costs. This allows a much greater access to capital since consumers can now contribute some of theses upfront costs. Producers no longer need to rely solely on banks and VC's to get their capital. This is a win-win for producers, consumers & the environment here as it will really help expand green energy development.
Check out their Q & A where they address some of the most common questions they get
The green energy sector has seen quite a bit of hype in the cryptocurrency sector compared to other sectors. There are a few other projects in the space (e.g. Power Ledger & Restart Energy), but frankly not too many. WePower doesn't have all that much competition here, yet there's clearly an important underlying need here for affordable green energy production. The energy consumed by cryptocurrency mining operations is already nearing 1% of total worldwide energy consumption.
WePower clearly has a solid & sustainable idea here. End-consumers don't necessarily need to have to be blockchain savvy to be involved so long as the buyers who do it on their behalf are, who would have access to platform and handle distribution to some end consumers who don't participate directly as a buyer.
WePower appears poised to do well in the long term here, so long as they have both producers and buyers who want to participate on the platform. Fortunately for them, they've already gained a lot of interest. For investors who are looking to get involved in the ICO who haven't already registered, unfortunately the news is not so good. They've closed off whitelist registration for those who haven't already registered, so if you haven't already registered, your odds of getting involved in the ICO which runs from February 1st to February 14th isn't all the good. For those already registered, it might just be a golden ticket.