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What is Power Ledger's play in the energy blockchain space?

Power Ledger is building an energy blockchain platform to connect all of the players of the energy ecosystem together - prosumers, consumers, market operators, utilities, etc. They want to “enable interoperability between diverse market management/pricing mechanisms and units of electricity (kWh) by way of pre-purchased tokens.” Here's my take on what they are up to. Business Model / Offering Power Ledger's offering is a blockchain-based platform that facilitates participation by “all” parties in the energy ecosystem, called the Platform. Utilities and other 3rd-party businesses that will facilitate trading on the platform are called Application Hosts. Examples of Application Hosts include energy retailers, property managers, and EV-charging businesses. Participants are the consumers or non-Application Hosts and the users. There will or can be an unlimited number of applications that run on the Power Ledger Platform. The first, and only one currently available, is FuseBox...

Should you do an ICO?

What is an ICO? An ICO is an initial coin offering. The New York Times recently described ICOs like this: "Imagine that a friend is building a casino and asks you to invest. In exchange, you get chips that can be used at the casino’s tables once it’s finished. Now imagine that the value of the chips isn’t fixed, and will instead fluctuate depending on the popularity of the casino, the number of other gamblers and the regulatory environment for casinos. Oh, and instead of a friend, imagine it’s a stranger on the internet who might be using a fake name, who might not actually know how to build a casino, and whom you probably can’t sue for fraud if he steals your money and uses it to buy a Porsche instead. That’s an I.C.O." ICOs are kind of like blockchain-based Initial Public Offerings (IPO) or crowd-funding campaigns. The IPO analogy works because, with an ICO, the company offers tokens or coins in exchange for some value, somewhat similar to an IPO where peo...

Intro Topic: Distributed Ledgers vs. Blockchains

What's the difference between distributed ledgers and blockchains? "Bits on Blocks" published a brief introduction on this topic earlier this year. The key takeaways from that article are pretty high level but still helpful when thinking about this. For example, this: If you want to include all the initiatives going on, use the term “distributed ledgers”. If you mean blockchains, where unrelated transactions are bundled into blocks, which are chained together using hashes and (in most cases) broadcast to all participating entities for batch processing, use “blockchains”. If you like acronyms, use “DLT”: Distributed Ledger Technology Colin Pratt also provided some very interesting detail on this concept along with a discussion on taxonomy in general in his blog post "Thoughts on the Taxonomy of Blockchains & Distributed Ledger Technologies." Colin highlights that Bitcoin's blockchain has some key features that really illustrate what makes it dif...

Energy Blockchain

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