Energy gems?
It was time to describe a new coin this week… but which one? Which coin would I describe. Finding one that has a future hasn't been easy yet! Let's be honest ... Now that Mr. Musk has gotten himself involved in crypto in a negative sense, manipulating the markets and eventually becoming the laughing third himself, it's time to look into the other gems that have a good foundational foundation. Which are environmentally friendly, because despite all the FUD that is wandering the markets at the moment. None of us can deny that Bitcoin is indeed a major energy consumer!
For that you only have to think of the large mining centers that have emerged from the ground. A normal PC cannot even mine Bitcoin anymore because it is not powerful enough. And the mining rigs that run 24/7 to mine the Bitcoin, yes that certainly gulps energy. In that regard, I have to tell Mr. Somewhere agree with Musk. Bitcoin is an energy consumer. Which, by the way, is not at all saying that he is entitled to how he plays his game. Don't get me wrong on this.
But can you find energy-friendly cryptos? You would expect that there should be. And it is. Today I'll take you through a description of the Energy Web Chain, and the Energy Web Token!
Yes, sorry… but following an energy-efficient / environmentally-friendly trend is never wrong, right?
Okay, here we go.
What is Energy Web?
Energy Web (EW), is a global non-profit organization accelerating a low-carbon, customer-centric power system by harnessing the potential of open-source, decentralized technologies. They are also known as the Energy Web Foundation. EW focus on building core infrastructure and shared technology, accelerating the adoption of commercial solutions, and fostering a community of practice.
Energy Web (EW) was launched in early 2017. They were co-founded by the globally respected energy think tank Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) and well-known blockchain developer Grid Singularity (GSy), along with a group of 10 other partners.
In 2019, EW launched the Energy Web Chain, the world's first open-source blockchain platform for businesses tailored to the energy sector. EW's technology roadmap has since evolved into the Energy Web Decentralized Operating System (EW-DOS), a full stack of front-end applications and a variety of software development toolkits (SDK).
The front-end is what you as a user see and communicate with, the user interface.
They want to contribute with solutions in the following three areas:
- Renewable energy markets
The EW Origin software development toolkit is designed to build new solutions for corporate renewable energy procurement and 100% certified guarantees for electric vehicle charging with renewable energy. Also for sourcing low carbon fuel and avoiding carbon tracking in accordance with relevant market standards and regulations. Their open-source app EW Zero enables every renewable energy buyer to find purchasing options in a wide variety of digital marketplaces worldwide. Zero integrates numerous marketplaces, including those built with EW Origin, through one convenient digital interface. Energy Web solutions for renewable energy markets have been implemented in more than a dozen countries around the world on four continents.
- Asking for flexibility
Digital solutions such as the EW Flex software development toolkit can help grid operators leverage the vast and growing pool of assets owned by customers. At the same time, they enable customers to improve the economy of Distributed Energy Resource (DER) ownership through greater participation in a variety of wholesale energy markets and / or demand-side management programs. This demand-side management refers to a group of actions designed to manage and optimize the energy consumption of a site. This way you can save costs, from grid charges to general system charges, including taxes.
- Electric vehicles
The right types of digital solutions are needed to seamlessly manage vehicle identities, green electric vehicle charging, grid flexibility and other services and financial settlement. The software development toolkits from EW Origin and EW Flex can help with this.
A nice detail here is that EWF (Energy Web Foundation) claims in their whitepaper that their blockchain has 2-3 orders of magnitude lower energy consumption than Ethereum. That's what you can call words to deeds and clearly shows their commitment to a cleaner environment.
EW has also grown the largest energy sector ecosystem in the world. This consists of utility companies, grid operators, renewable energy developers, corporate energy buyers and others, focused on open-source and decentralized digital technologies. In the latter case, think of dApps, which can be built by third parties.
So far they have done this in three ways.
Building core infrastructure and shared technology
They developed and operate the Energy Web Decentralized Operating System (EW-DOS), an open-source stack of decentralized software and standards. That includes the Energy Web Chain and several SDKs (software development toolkits), which support two primary use cases:Traceability of clean energy and carbon emissions.
Use of distributed energy sources to increase the flexibility of the grid.
These SDKs help developers streamline the development of their energy applications and reduce costs.
Think of EW-DOS as the new digital DNA of the electricity grid, a shared technology that runs on a decentralized network maintained by some of the world's most respected energy companies.
EW-DOS uses self-sovereign decentralized identifiers. These are a series of decentralized registries, messaging services and integrations with legacy information technology systems. In this way, transactions between billions of assets, customers, network operators, service providers and retailers can be facilitated. This way you can also create "EW-DOS passports", based on decentralized identifiers (DIDs). These are located in an identity directory associated with different application registries.
With this architecture, blockchain-based digital identities become the common reference point for all participants and systems within a given market. Just as real passports are the basis for confirming your identity and your rights (e.g. the ability to travel) in any region, they are the basis for registering and monitoring the actions of assets and customers in electricity markets.
- Rapid adoption of commercial solutions
Web Energy works directly with participants in the energy market to build and deploy market-specific commercial solutions on top of EW-DOS. Market participants are also supported, advised and brought together to create trade and customer value with blockchain and other digital technologies.
Fostering a community of practice
They see themselves as a mission-driven non-profit organization and want to stimulate a sustainable ecosystem around EW-DOS. Meanwhile, they have built the world's largest energy sector ecosystem focused on open-source, decentralized technology.
In addition, they want to stimulate the community through:
- Training and education on decentralized technologies.
- Connecting industry colleagues facing similar challenges and seeking and finding groundbreaking decentralized solutions together.
What makes Energy Web even more special is the way their nodes are controlled in the blockchain. In a typical 'home, garden and kitchen' blockchain on Ethereum, the nodes are run by volunteers located all over the world. At EW, unlike most public blockchains, the nodes are managed by well-known and trusted companies. Many of these companies are large and well-respected energy suppliers. To name a few validators, think Shell, Elia and LO3, as well as small startups such as OLI Systems, FlexiDAO and Anyblock Analytics.
At the moment, only energy companies that meet the high standards of EWF can become validators on the network.
A blockchain validator is someone responsible for verifying transactions on a blockchain. Once transactions are verified, they are added to the distributed ledger
Energy Web uses a variant of the Proof of Work consensus mechanism called Proof of Authority (PoA) to keep EW Chain's distributed network in sync. While not structurally different from PoW, the PoA mechanism only allows a certain number of nodes to validate transactions and create blocks. These are called validator nodes, which must meet certain eligibility criteria, such as being a legally registered organization and being an official member of the Energy Web Foundation.
What is the Energy Web token (EWT)?
The Energy Web Token (EWT) protects the network against misconduct, compensates for node validators via transaction fees and block rewards, and can be used to pay for services that streamline and improve dApps.
Owning EWT gives you the opportunity to participate in the roe deerks products and services built within the Energy Web ecosystem, and to send EWT to every other participant on the network.
It is important to note that users and application developers are not required to use EWT for their own applications, apart from paying transaction fees on the EW Chain. They can use cryptocurrencies or fiat currencies as well as second tier tokens specific to their specific uses.
In total, a maximum of 100 million EWTs will be released over 10 years. At the moment, according to CoinMarketCap, there are 30,062,138 EWT in circulation, with the following footnote from CMC that according to the EW project, there is a self-reported circulation of 32,932,614 EWT.
Of the total stock, 14,093,276 tokens have been distributed to the Energy Web Team as a gift. An additional 10,000,000 ETW tokens were given to two founding organizations; however, there is a waiting period until June 2021 when these tokens become tradable. An additional 4,061,709 tokens were also spent on a community fund, which should continue to grow over the course of a decade.
Note that the native EWT is not an ERC20 token. However, EW has developed the EWT Bridged (EWTB) token, an ERC20 token that can be minted through a bridge and provides a method to quickly and cost-effectively transfer EWT from the Energy Web Chain to the Ethereum mainnet.
At the moment, you can only buy EWT on a very limited number of exchanges, including KuCoin, Kraken and BitMart.
What is a suitable wallet for the EWT token?
There are many suitable wallets with which they can communicate with the Energy Web Chain and store EWT, such as MyCrypto or MetaMask and hardware wallets such as Ledger and Trezor.
EW have introduced a web-based and custom wallet (based on the open-source MyCrypto wallet), which is pre-configured to connect to their Volta test network and the Energy Web Chain. This wallet has also been tested with hardware wallets such as Ledger and Trezor.
Energy Web team, consultants and partners
The Energy Web team is large and easy to find on their web page and is divided into four groups.
Leadership with 4 people.
Market involvement with 10 people.
Operations and support with 1 person.
Technology with 18 people.
In the leadership we see that Walter Kok is the CEO, a Dutchman. With nearly three decades of experience leading customer solutions and operations teams in complex global organizational environments, including in FinTech, telecommunications and information technology (IT). Among other things, he was COO at the ING bank for 4 years and he has a Master of Science in computer system networks and telecommunications from Eindhoven University of Technology.
Jesse Morris is the CCO with extensive experience in the electricity sector.
Raffaella Piraino is in charge of finances and Micha Roon is in charge of technology, with extensive blockchain experience in his baggage.
There are no two advisers to be found, but then the Web Energy Foundation Council comes in, and there is also a great wealth of knowledge and experience in it.
As far as the partners are concerned, there are already about a hundred of them in the field of energy and blockchain, and they are not exactly the smallest. These include utilities, grid operators, renewable energy and cleantech companies, blockchain developers, and more. Some of these companies are also validators on the EW chain.
Energy Web roadmap
The EW roadmap is already in place and ready, they have their Energy Web Chain and their EW-DOS. The question now is what more is to come?
In February 2021, Walter Kok will talk about escrow-based service-level agreements (SLAs). And also about a decentralized SLA or a DSLA.
A service level agreement (SLA) is an agreement between a service provider and a customer. Certain aspects of the service - quality, availability, responsibilities, are agreed between the service provider and the service user. EW takes away the middleman and comes up with a DSLA.
For business customers: With a decentralized SLA you can easily purchase IT and network services. You sign up for a pool of services offered by multiple vendors simultaneously, and automatically enforce contractual terms in a trusted manner.
For Suppliers: While an open source protocol in some ways commoditizes certain IT infrastructure services, it also lowers the threshold for customer acquisition and simplifies service delivery.
- Commodity is a good or service that can be made widely available and interchangeable with a product supplied by another company.
- Staking is also planned for the third quarter in 2021.
Realized service activities.
It is divided into four main blocks:
- Client tasks (consuming the service),
- Provider tasks (providing the service),
- The Watchtower (monitoring and reporting on the service activities),
- Governance tasks (smart contracts executing the DSLAs).
Things are getting a bit more technical now, as EW sees the DSLA as an important aspect of the Utility Layer of the Energy Web technology stack. The Utility Layer includes a variety of "digital machines" (i.e. services) that power the dApps running on the Energy Web Chain.
That is why EW has unveiled the EWT Escrow model, as a way to unlock the full potential of the Energy Web technology stack to achieve the delivery of a decentralized service business and its objectives.
The goal now is to put the first Utility Layer services, complete with escrow and subscriptions, into production by the third quarter of 2021.
Here are the plans for the rest of 2021:
More information will be published on the service subscription model and how the EW Switchboard is used to manage both escrow and subscriptions. This will then be accompanied by a series of video demonstrations, technical documentation and a clickable prototype for the escrow and subscription models.
In May 2021, an alpha version of escrow and subscription tools will be running on their Volta test network.
In June 2021, they will run a beta of escrow and service components on the Energy Web Chain (EWC), with a first group of service providers from the EWC validation community.
For the remainder of the year, they want to focus on scaling the Utility Layer service network and hiring additional suppliers and customers from the wider Energy Web community. They will also be adding new utility layer services and integrating the escrow and subscription models with exchanges and other external systems to make it even easier to participate.
Popularity of Energy Web with social media
Energy Web has a good presence on the various social media channels. Then let's check that out:
- Telegram with 6500 members.
- Reddit with nearly 2500 readers.
- LinkedIn with 8850 followers.
- Twitter with 29000 followers.
- Facebook with 1300 followers.
- Youtube with almost 1800 followers.
- Medium - here they are active with many articles written.
I know, it's quite a lot to read ... but well, if Elon Musk wants an energy friendly crypto ... here we have one. Maybe it will be able to take profit from this "ElonGate", but I don't know. Today's price of EWT is $13.95
For today I thought this could be a nice coin to take a look at. So I did. Now it's up to you what you are going to do with it.
