Autor Cointelegraph By Julian Jackson

Decentralized autonomous organizations come in all sizes and flavors. Some can seem sweet; others turn sour. It can be fun and interesting to create one that suits your needs and satisfies your hunger for something new. We talk to the master chefs — Noam Hof of DeepDAO, Stru Delman of Aragon, and Fabien of Snapshot — who are mixing up new and exciting recipes for participatory goodness that you can bake at home.A DAO is an online community that collectively controls a cryptocurrency fund to achieve a particular goal — whether buying a copy of the United States constitution or running a DeFi protocol — explains Delman from Aragon, an organization that “midwifes” DAOs and has helped usher almost 4,000 DAOs into existence.“The idea is attempting to automate as many exchanges between people as possible and making it trustless so you don’t need to trust people,” Delman explains. “This makes it easier to collaborate with people that you meet online or to create a global team.”You’ll need a good idea and a recipe for how to achieve success. Is it going to have the substance to make a fulfilling meal, or will it collapse like a badly done souffle?You’ll also need a set of tools — and unique ingredients — and some collaborators to help you bring this banquet to the table for more people to enjoy.You can bake your own DAO at home using this simple recipe.Just five ingredients:Establish a common goal, mission or objective.Build a community of like-minded people using Discord or Telegram.Create a shared fund to finance your goal.Construct a governance framework.Communicate to the group how the project is developing and disburse rewards as appropriate to contributors.Let’s take a look at the different flavors of DAOs:Protocol DAOsThese are DAOs that facilitate the running of protocols.ENS DAO governs the Web3 protocol that allows users of the Ethereum Name Service (ENS) to create Ethereum names that are both human- and machine-readable. It’s the Web3 equivalent of a DNS service provider.The Uniswap community uses voting for decision-making on the development and some operations of the Uniswap DEX. UNI tokenholders vote on Uniswap governance, protocol fee changes and UNI community treasury funds alongside other aspects.Philanthropy DAOsPhilanthropy DAOs are also one of the rarer types of DAO right now. They focus on supporting socially beneficial initiatives that have a shared goal. As the sector matures, it is likely that more philanthropic DAOs will emerge.Big Green DAO is a U.S.-based 501c3 nonprofit that specializes in giving grants to growing food projects, believing that DAOs simplify and empower nonprofits. It supports schools, families and communities to grow their own food.Big Green DAO is a philanthropy-minded DAO.Giveth is a DAO that facilitates sending donations to charitable projects. There are 1,578 projects listed on its website, which include food growing in Costa Rica and feeding the homeless in Canada. There are “trusted third parties” like JustGiving that already do this, but Giveth claims to be more open, transparent and decentralized without taking a large cut of the fees.Collector DAOs Many people in the crypto ecosystem are interested in collecting. Collector DAOs focus on accumulating funds so the group can purchase valuable NFTs and other digital collectibles. Some people call collector DAOs “NFT DAOs” if they are about collecting those specifically.Flamingo, which was the first, specializes in collecting premium NFTs. For example, it paid over $700,000 to own the CryptoPunk #2890 NFT.PleasrDAO is an art collecting club, where participants purchase what they believe is important art for the community. It describes itself as “a platform for collective experimentation at the nexus of community ownership, DeFi and digital art.”Investment DAOsInvestment groups have been common for a long time, where a number of people get together to share investment knowledge and split the risk.Investment DAOs work similarly to traditional investment funds. They operate the same model of using a pool of funds as in the traditional investment funds, although without any centralized controlling entity. In this type of DAO, tokenholders vote on decisions regarding projects for investing funds. Syndicate is an umbrella organization that has facilitated the creation and operation of investment clubs through decentralized mechanisms. It calls these “Web3 Investment Clubs,” where participants can create a group of up to 99 investors, pool their capital, and vote on where to invest those funds.This morning over 20,000+ investment clubs have now been created on Syndicate ?And this is just the beginning—our next phase is coming. Join us.Start a club on Ethereum Mainnet or Polygon today:https://t.co/9Mma3mH2xh pic.twitter.com/JybBDsu7Du— Syndicate ✺ (@SyndicateDAO) July 21, 2022Grants DAOsSimilar to investment DAOs, there are also grants DAOs. These are tailored for funding and nurturing new projects and ventures, particularly in the DeFi space. Grants DAOs put their funds into projects to advance a particular scheme, which could be to fund scientific research or environmental activism or a whole range of different types of projects.VitaDAO is an open cooperative that anyone can join, granting funds to research new therapeutics and science aiming to increase the human lifespan.Meta Gamma Delta is a collective that supports and empowers women-led projects through grant funding.The way your DAOs will bubble up when mixed together would customarily include:PlanningDrafting and programming smart contracts, wallets and tokensEstablishing an initial communityReaching out to new participantsDevelopment and change.Organizations in the conventional world tend to be slower moving, less flexible, and very much less transparent and decentralized than DAOs.You’ll need some tools for the job. No, we don’t mean in Discord.The tools you will need:Aragon Client, Snapshot, a wallet, and some crypto. ETH is a good choice, but there are others, including any decentralized cryptocurrency that supports DAO creation, such as Cardano (ADA), Solana (SOL) or Polkadot (DOT).Step 1: Lightly toast governanceOnce you have your concept, you will need to put some form of governance in place. Hof of DeepDAO, an organization concerned with researching and supporting better DAO governance, says:“You need to know what you want to do, and you need a strategy for how to achieve that. You also need research and planning.”Hof emphasizes the need to be flexible and effective: a rigid plan that is not adaptable in practice is a hindrance. Some DAOs can accommodate fairly passive participants — for example, in investing in companies or NFTs. However, community-led or charitable ventures often demand a degree of commitment from the participants. Hof continues:“If it is a project where committed activists are important, it is better to set up a governance structure and rules that take this into consideration in advance. Since this is all very flexible and even playful and the tools are there for almost any strategy or method of decision making that we are aware of, then you can construct a governance structure that fits your project’s needs.”You essentially create a mini economy around a token. You have to decide what the different activities and priorities and contributions are. “You have a token, which might not just be a unit of value, but also symbolizes all the incentives and goals, so you can align different stakeholders to your objective,” Hof says.For example, you could have “one person, one vote,” the norm in conventional systems, or you could have a token structure where votes are weighted to those with the most of them: That might be appropriate where there are core active members, or in an investment project where some have staked more money than others, so they have more risk. It really depends on the circumstances.Hof recommends creating a founding document, a mission statement, and a guide to what you are doing: nothing too rigid, but important nonetheless.Step 2: Stir in some expertiseHof continues, “If you had an investment project, you might want to be guided by five people who were experts in the field — 90% of the members might agree to delegate authority to them to make the decisions.”Mixing in some expertise often makes all the difference.Likewise in areas of scientific expertise, VitaDAO grants funds to groups to explore life extension science. This is at the cutting-edge of science, and while the members are often interested laypeople, VitaDAO needs scientists to carry out the research. The scientific projects do not need to join the DAO — it’s a consensus of the participants who decide what studies to fund.Hof also stresses the importance of getting good technical people to program your smart contracts because that is a major area where things can go wrong.Step 3: Heat up the stakesDelman of Aragon is a former real-world community activist turned DAOist. He says, “I see a DAO as a little like Kickstarter. Instead of giving you a free T-shirt or free product, a DAO gives you a stake in what you are building.”It is a new model of high-risk and high-reward community activity facilitated by technology. Over 3,800 DAOs have been built with Aragon’s tools since its inception in 2016, managing billions of dollars worth of assets.“There’s just a big culture around Web3 people that have a different mindset for collaborating. Most people [in the DAO ecosystem] are not working a normal job. Maybe they’re in three or five DAOs that they contribute to and they’re floating around, so you have a much more fluid way of working.”Aragon put out a manifesto that summarizes its mission statement and philosophy: a pledge to fight for freedom, exclaiming, “We believe humankind should use technology as a liberating tool to unleash all the goodwill and creativity of our species, rather than as a tool to enslave and take advantage of one another.”“Thus, Aragon is a fight for freedom. Aragon empowers freedom by creating liberating tools that leverage decentralized technologies.”Excited to formalize our partnership with @StarkWareLtd. We believe that the future of DAO governance needs to be fast and inclusive and that users shouldn’t have to choose between security and cheap fees. https://t.co/GGPpT1IOZg— Snapshot (Hiring!) (@SnapshotLabs) June 9, 2022Step 4: Mix and match voting methodsDeveloper and entrepreneur Fabien developed Snapshot as a side project on weekends. His day job is working for Balancer as a developer, which is an automated trading platform.Snapshot’s taken off because it is a simple and free method of voting in DAOs, which is off-chain and efficient in utilizing resources. On-chain voting uses hard-coded voting systems built into the blockchain smart contracts. Tezos is an example. On-chain voting is effective but quite resource-intensive, so keeping voting off the main blockchain is often desirable.Fabien says, “We have 300 voting strategies, and then they all have a different way of working, and you can pick one of them if the way you want to calculate voting was already there, or you can create a new one and upload it to our site. It’s free and allows all kinds of optimization of voting between participants.”Fabien believes that DAO-enabled voting structures will eventually enable a greater degree of democracy and more flattened decision-making than is conventionally organized in Western politics.There are online tools to help you bake your own DAO.Step 5: Bake it, then the DAO’s ready for public consumptionDelman says, “The tool that Aragon operates is basically you can press a few buttons and then you are ready. If this proposal passes, then the money should move to this account. Everything is tied together with smart contracts.”Delman gives as examples two projects that used Aragon as their backbone: Ocean DAO is a DAO to clean up the oceans. Delman continues, “This is a big vision with social ownership. There is no overall plan: The community will take it step by step.”Bankless DAO is a decentralized community whose mission is to move the world away from banks. Given the power that banks have over everybody, this seems an interesting project.Delman notes, “There’s also a lot of stuff that DAOs do that’s not on the blockchain.” This speeds up the process and stops blockchains from being clogged up with information that could easily reside elsewhere.Recipe note:DAOs are in their infancy. Clearly, there is a massive amount of development needed and also outreach so people who might consider a more conventional vehicle for their project — a voluntary group, a charity, a club — need to be made aware that DAOs could also fulfill this purpose in a much more democratic and transparent way than most conventional organizations.There needs to be more work by regulators on the legal status of DAOs. So far, only Wyoming has passed legislation to enable people to incorporate a DAO LLC in the state, therefore, giving all the participants a degree of legal protection that a normal DAO cannot. (Australia is also considering legislation to address this.) The legal status of DAOs is a thorny issue, particularly if large amounts of funds are involved, but given the sluggishness of both the law itself and legislative bodies, it doesn’t seem that there will be much clarification of this in the near future.Once the cake has been baked, you can choose to hand it over to the people who helped create it.To serve: Cut the cake and pass it aroundDelman feels a major difference between DAOs and both conventional finance and even the rest of the cryptocurrency sector is “exit to community.” Many startups get big, then they sell out, and the founders leave.Delman feels that selling tokens and exiting to members of the community is a more positive way of moving on from a project. With the flexibility of DAOs, the departure of the founder or a large change of direction is not the shock it can be in other types of organizations.NOTE: The nutritional value of DAOs may vary, and some can have indigestible ingredients, so you need to check the small print before you consume them.

Photography often has to weather disruptive changes — from film to digital, for example — and photographers find themselves needing to master new technologies or face losing out to more tech-savvy competitors. NFTs are just another transformation in how we consume images. Can photographers adapt and benefit from them?Coming to grips with the NFT market can give a whole new lease of life to a photographer’s work.Back in the dark agesI go back a long time in photography. To the dark ages — or at least the darkroom ages, to be more precise — when images were analog and negatives or color transparencies had to be developed through some arcane magical process I didn’t quite understand. If you had told me you had to wave a Harry Potter wand and shout “Developus!” I would have believed you.You could make a decent living as a professional photographer in those days. There were a lot of career avenues: portrait shops on High Street, highly paid advertising and fashion photographers, local newspapers employed “snappers,” and specialist travel or nature photographers could make money from magazines and TV.During the 1990s, there was a huge, disruptive transformation from film to digital imaging. Anyone could do it, and smartphones started to outperform many cameras. The culture changed so that a selfie was more valid than something beautifully lit in a studio. Local newspapers folded or stopped employing professionals. It became a hard slog for many talented people. Stock photography sites cut prices and now sell images for only a few dollars, of which the photographer is lucky to get 20%.I have noticed that the photographers who are successful are good at marketing. Many people are talented, but you have to ensure that your work is in front of the right people to make money. It’s especially important in the brave new world of NFTs, which have become popular with the art and photography communities, even among those who know virtually nothing about crypto.How do you go about it?Anyone can go out with their camera or smartphone and take a picture. Then you “mint,” turn it into an NFT, showcase it on a platform like OpenSea, and wait for buyers to come in… Is it really that simple? As it turns out, no, it’s not — even though you’ll sometimes hear things like this:“June 2021 was just crazy: I had some collections completely sold out. In the short period of time till August or perhaps early September, the market was peaking. I sold maybe 50 pieces in one day!” says photographer Jan Erik Waider.Waider is a fine art and landscape photographer. Based in Hamburg, he has a fascination with the arctic regions and an interest in technology.Some years ago, I came across his work through his Northlandscapes “presets” for the professional photographer’s tool of choice, Adobe Lightroom.Lava from the collection “Abstract Landscapes” by Jan Erik Waider, on OpenSea. (Source: Jan Erik Waider)Waider created his images with a set of filters for Lightroom, and he realized that other photographers would benefit from them. So, you can buy them as plug-ins for the application. They can speed up complex post-production of landscape images quite a bit. They are also customizable, so you can tweak them to fit your particular vision.Before he took the leap into full-time professional photography around five years ago, Waider was involved in design and marketing, so he has a firm grasp of the importance of reaching out to find an audience.As a technophile, he got interested in crypto in the early days. “I love to try out new things that pop up here and there. About eight or nine years ago, I got into Bitcoin. Then I stumbled upon NFTs, maybe earlier than some of my colleagues because I wanted to try them out and see where they took me.”When he started creating NFTs, few photographic artworks were on platforms like OpenSea or Rarible.“I was listening to a lot of YouTube crypto channels, and people started talking about NFTs in 2019,” he says. “I was interested but cautious. It kept growing, so I decided to put up three single works to try it out.”“I quickly realized that you have to be active, connect with collectors, so I was tweeting five times a day. I was posting constantly, using optimization tools, but it was still exhausting [laughs].”For an old-school photographer, it’s an entirely new marketplace with new rules. People who collect NFTs would probably never go into a fancy gallery to buy some art. The way to draw attention to your work is to build up a following on Twitter — and that’s it. Other social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook aren’t even in the game, according to Waider.“Basalt” by Jan Erik Waider, one of his single editions on Foundation. (Source: Jan Erik Waider)What are the benefits for creative people?After a while, Waider sold a “genesis piece” — that is, the first NFT he put up online — to a collector of them for 0.5 ETH, which was $1,500 at the time. “I was really a little bit in shock at the price.”One of the major benefits of NFTs for creative people is payment for resales. The visual arts market has long been dogged by an imbalance, where someone might sell an artwork for pennies that goes on to be very valuable without the creator profiting at all. Vincent Van Gogh comes to mind, but it is endemic to secondary markets.Scopio founders Nour Chamoun (left) and Christina Hawatmeh (right). (Source: Scop.io)Waider says, “I normally sell an image and don’t see a cent of it afterward. With NFTs, I am getting secondary sales, which is purely passive income.”Christina Hawatmeh is the co-founder and CEO of stock image agency Scopio. It was set up nine years ago to showcase diversity in images and licenses visual content from 14,000 photographers, illustrators and creators in 150 countries. “We actually have hit the most creative generation in history,” Hawatmeh says.She quickly realized the potential of NFTs, so it was one of the first photo agencies to offer both conventional licensing and NFTs, on the Solana blockchain.Each image can be published in mainstream media — such as a book, advertisement or video — but also purchased as a collectible NFT.“For me, it is a practical thing,” Hawatmeh says. “It solves a lot of my business problems — payments, tracking, giving ownership to multiple parties through wallet splitting, giving a chance for the model in the photo to earn also. Web2 photography is broken. This gives us a fresh start and more ownership for the artist.”“We have a goal of elevating human stories from underrepresented communities and regions. Our photographers come from all over the world, and often there are barriers for all these different artists to participate, principally the payment method. How can they receive money for their work? There are things like PayPal, but it is still a problem. Crypto has transformed that. No government can take that away from them.”Hawatmeh continues, “I think we are in a new Renaissance era. Perhaps COVID is similar to what the Black Death did to the Renaissance era — meaning people want art and culture more than ever. They want it at the center of their society because they were deprived of joy for so long. Imagery, media and content open up our minds. We now have the tools to connect different parts of the world together to tell better stories on a micro level.”The Year Time Stopped, featuring F. Dilek Uyar. (Source: Scop.io.)What are the pitfalls and challenges?Scopio was due to launch its first book on June 21: The Year Time Stopped: The Global Pandemic in Photos. It’s a visual history of COVID-19 with 200 images from around the world. The photos are available individually as NFTs.Scopio uses Solana as its blockchain network because the cost of minting is cheaper and the carbon-neutrality of the network appeals to both buyers and creators, who often have environmental concerns.The Year Time Stopped book and NFT photo collection. (Source: Scop.io)Selling an NFT for 1 SOL is a far lower price point than the 1 ETH that is often offered on the leading NFT platforms — the idea being that it’s a price range more suitable for a broader range of buyers.Hawatmeh thinks that narrative and storytelling are a big part of the appeal of photographic NFTs. “The more information, the more storytelling, the more time you spend on building that narrative is going to make your images more valuable.”The murky world of legalityIt’s all well and good for photographers and photo agencies to start selling NFTs of their work, but it’s not entirely clear yet what they are selling. What rights are creators giving up, and what rights do the NFT owners purchase?Nancy E. Wolff, a partner at Cowan, DeBaets, Abrahams & Sheppard, is a New York lawyer specializing in intellectual property. She is widely respected as someone grappling with the complex legal issues around new media.“It’s a whole new frontier, and technology is always leaping years ahead of the law,” she says, while being careful to point out that existing copyright laws and precedents can be applied to NFTs in many cases. In most cases, copyright or commercial use rights are not transferred by the sale of an NFT (though with Bored Ape Yacht Club, you famously do get the commercial use rights.)“In the same way you might buy a print in a gallery, you don’t own the copyright of an NFT. If you want to buy an NFT, you need to look at the platform’s terms and conditions: What rights are you getting?”“Likewise, if you want to sell on an NFT platform, you need also to be careful about what rights you are signing away. There’s a lot of potential for infringements. For example, if you create NFTs from pictures of NBA stars, something like a collectible trading card. There are still third-party rights to be cleared, whether it’s a poster to put on the wall or an NFT. Some organizations have become very aggressive about enforcing their rights.”There is still the gray area of what to do with an infringing NFT: The token is immutably on the blockchain, and while the image itself usually isn’t (given storage costs), it is often be hosted on a decentralized platform like IPFS, making it more difficult to take images down or delete them.Occasionally, printed works have been pulped after legal cases, but that’s tricky to do with an NFT. Centralized platforms like OpenSea have pulled down infringing NFTs, but decentralized platforms are unlikely to.Waider believes that in the future, NFTs may give him more say over the final destinations of his imagery. “I can see the potential for photographers to control where their images are used. I don’t see that happening right now, but it could be implemented,” he says.The audience for NFTsBeing at the intersection of art, finance and internet meme culture, NFT fans are not your typical purchasers of conventional photographic art.“Almost always a totally different audience,” says Waider. “They are mostly coming from the crypto world. It’s a lot of tech people in general. So, that also explains why they’re coming from Twitter, as you have a lot of tech people on there. It’s a completely different approach to how a classic collector would look at buying a piece in a gallery.”“It’s really hard to get into their mindset — to know what they like.”He says the collections of some of his patrons are marked by their Catholic tastes. “It’s every genre you could imagine from photomanipulated stuff to classic landscapes, to portraits, to urban photography, black-and-white photography. So, it’s a big mix.”“Save the Planet,” an award-winning image by Meric Aktar. A villager waters saplings in an area devastated by wildfire.  (Source: Meric Aktar/Scop.io)Waider thinks NFT collectors are motivated as much by fun and enjoyment when purchasing as any other consideration. Some people have made money in crypto trading, and they want to enjoy it. If they like a photo, they will buy it, with price being a minor consideration. Many people collect NFTs because the image “speaks to them” — creates an emotional connection. Wolff says that motion is an important element:“Often, a lot of the interesting NFTs are ones that have some kind of interaction or are built digital, rather than static images.”Wolff says, “I think the NFTs that are most successful are where your buyer and the creator of the object have an experience together, or there’s some kind of engagement or they learn something, so they feel like they’re part of an experience. It works very well for concepts and conceptual art, as well as storytelling, where you express more than just the visual aspect.”Waider’s tips for photography NFT noobsIt’s a patience game: Sales rarely happen overnight.You need to study the market.Some platforms, like SuperRare, have a “quality vibe.”An active Twitter profile is a must.Research pricing and what sells on what platform.Start with a small number of images to test the response.A collection should have a theme, not just be a “road trip” of vaguely connected pictures.Narrative is important.Creating a good showcase collection of images is a significant investment of effort: Images with good descriptions are more likely to get noticed than ones without text. Careful planning and execution will pay off in time.

Much has been said about Bitcoin‘s carbon emissions. Far less has been said about the potential of blockchain to increase the efficiency of renewables by transparently managing supply and demand. Blockchain doesn‘t pose a threat to the planet — it’s going to play an essential role in helping to bring about a net-zero carbon emission economy.It is a few years in the future: You are sitting on your sofa, having a nice coffee after loading the washing machine. You’ve switched it on but, of course, the Internet of Things-enabled machine checks prices and will run when it hits a cheap electricity window. The Tesla outside in the drive is fully charged, you don‘t have any plans to go any further than the supermarket today, so the battery is available to sell its energy back to the grid and deposit tokens in your energy wallet if the electricity grid requires power.Back to today.Energy and electricity, in particular, are vital to our society. The grim effects on Texas in the 2021 freeze — where more than 4.5 million homes and businesses were left in the icy dark, causing misery and 246 deaths — showed us how vulnerable all our systems are to trouble with the electricity supply.Blockchain is an essential part of turning the power grid green.In 1882, the first U.S. electricity plant, the Pearl Street Station, started producing power for around 85 customers‘ lights in Manhattan, using DC current. Westinghouse, a rival to Thomas Edison’s company, invented AC power and built a big hydropower plant at Niagara Falls to supply electricity to Buffalo, NY. Other developed countries followed suit. The model was a large centralized power plant that, through a grid, sent high voltage electricity to substations and distributed it to residential and business consumers.This model worked well for more than a century or so. It does, however, rely on large, expensive and centralized power stations fueled by coal, natural gas, hydro or nuclear. It‘s a top-down structure.Well, DER…Now we have a new paradigm: In a transition to a decarbonized future, we have lots of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) to deal with. These could be wind or solar generators, but they could also be battery storage, hydrogen fuel cells, smart appliances or electric vehicles. Utility company Dominion Energy, for example, is investing in a fleet of school buses in Fairfax, Virginia.A solar panel microgrid on a building in South Africa. Source: The Sun ExchangeTwice a day, they will be picking up and dropping off kids. The rest of the time, they sit in the depot to serve as a giant battery for the local power grid. Instead of a few large power stations, soon, we will have a very complex web of producers and consumers. In the old days, if a national grid needed more power, someone flicked a switch and another power plant came online. Conversely, if there was too much, an engineer somewhere shut one down.Balancing all the loads from different inputs and outputs is much more difficult in a distributed system and requires a lot of AI, data analytics and some sort of transparent, accessible, trusted and un-manipulable accounting system. You might have come across something of this nature. Spoiler: These are blockchain and tokenomics.The new energy paradigm is a rough beast, slouching to be born, to misquote Irish poet W.B. Yeats. But, we can look at a few pioneers in the field.Distro – Port of RotterdamRotterdam in the Netherlands is the largest port in the world, handling incredible amounts of cargo every day. It uses a lot of electricity. BlockLab.nl teamed up with S&P Global Commodity Insights, a giant in the field of commodity trading and analytics, to create Distro, an AI-based trading platform to buy and sell energy from a solar power microgrid on the roofs of buildings within the port complex.It uses high-frequency trading and blockchain accounting to drive down user costs by 11%, produce returns up 14% and reduce emissions of CO2, according to an in-house analysis released October 5, 2021. The success of this pilot project has generated tremendous interest in replicating this in other places, according to James Rilett, senior director of Innovation at S&P Global Commodity Insights.The Port of Rotterdam. Supplied.BlockLab is a multi-disciplinary innovation laboratory that aims to put blockchain technology into practical use by building applications to enhance the global energy transition and optimize global supply chains. It is backed by the Port of Rotterdam and collaborates with leading universities and technology developers.Janjoost Jullens, energy lead at the BlockLab, met Rilett at an exhibition and there was an immediate exchange of ideas. James Rilett says,“We were already thinking about AI, blockchain, big data and the energy transition. What we wanted to do is bring the best bits of the proven evolution of energy markets to a new technological paradigm.”The Port of Rotterdam backed the project in 2018 with a small amount of “pizza money,” with the clear direction that it had to be a practical and realizable project, not some vaporware. Distro is a peer-to-peer energy network of consumers and “prosumers.” That is, users that both generate power and consume it as well. All the energy trading is automated, so there is minimal administration needed.“It‘s a very innovative and realistic method,” Janjoost says. “We blend together blockchain, algorithm trading, data engineering and data science — a business solution that copes with decentralization.”Blockchain is the “special sauce,” as James describes it, that ensures that transactions are fair, transparent and reconciled, which is a big issue in the conventional energy trading world.“The platform has hosted 20 million blockchain-validated, cleared and settled transactions. The blockchain lowers the price at which it is sensible to manage microtransactions because it‘s beautiful technology out of the box that helps those transactions clear in a trustful way. It is unique and new to the power market.”They are working on scaling this technology to larger projects. The first will be implemented in the Port of Rotterdam industrial area, which accounts for 35% of the Netherlands‘ entire carbon emissions, and the second is a microgrid development in California.Another niche use is “Shore Power.” Docked ships need variable power, usually using diesel generators, and produce fine dust air pollution. Distro is working on replacing this with clean energy supplied by renewables to overcome this problem.Powerledger announced as a winner at the World Summit Awards (@WSAoffice) in the Environment and Green Energy category, for our peer-to-peer energy trading project in Uttar Pradesh, India!Read more here: https://t.co/klyrqu0m5B#wsa2021 #UN #wsa2022 #HackTheGap #UNSDGs pic.twitter.com/aPQulKFeGO— Powerledger (@PowerLedger_io) February 7, 2022Ledger of PowerAustralia’s Powerledger is pushing forward with decentralized markets so that renewable energy generation, storage and purchasing power are harnessed in an optimal way. It aims to expand the use of renewables by using advanced trading between microgrids to ensure that high penetration levels will not cause grid instability.Ensuring continuity in transmission and distribution is essential with intermittent renewable energy sources to avoid conventional grid failures, including not only blackouts but brownouts, where the grid falls below its operating parameters and causes problems with equipment.It has already established almost a dozen projects in Australia and various other countries. Powerledger released the Solana-based token POWR on Coinbase and Binance last year.Jemma Green, Powerledger executive chairman and co-founder, tells Magazine:“What happens is that energy companies often bundle fossil fuel energy into the mix to make up for holes in the supply of intermittent renewable energy.”She believes that storage, including EV batteries and the use of advanced market software, will bridge that gap as more renewables come into the energy mix.Powerledger‘s uGrid software is being used in Thailand in project T77 to trade rooftop solar power between an international school, apartment complex, shopping center and dental hospital in Bangkok. This blockchain-based software is the backbone of the peer-to-peer trading system that enables energy distribution within the community. This is cheaper than the grid and reduces emissions because the generation is local and not from a distant power station. The key technology is a blockchain app that trades energy between participants rapidly to get the best price in a microsecond-by-microsecond fluctuating market of supply and demand.Powerledger is working on 30 projects in 11 countries, so these different energy technologies are being put through their paces to validate their performance. Green says:“People are, understandably, apprehensive about any new technology, but blockchain is the building block for a whole new internet. It’s a whole new era where you can take the sun‘s rays and turn it into a currency.”There is a lot of potential for these projects across the developing world, perhaps in the way that smartphone banking applications leapfrogged the Western concept of high street banks and went straight to mobile users in Africa and Asia.Justin Sun not involvedAcross Asia, numerous other projects harnessing sustainable energy and blockchain are being implemented. Launched in 2015, The Sun Exchange‘s micro-leasing marketplace in South Africa brings individual and corporate energy investors to off-grid energy development. Tokens are a way to finance a project without going down the route of conventional capital, which not all projects can.Blockchain can also be valuable for measuring, recording and verifying greenhouse gas emissions. ECO2 Ledger uses blockchain technology to make carbon credit data more reliable and traceable in the voluntary carbon market in China, where individuals can track their carbon emissions on the MyCarbon app and trade with those who need carbon credits. Launched in mid-November 2019, it quickly accumulated over 500,000 users, with its website claiming to have traded 100,000 tons of carbon credit.MyCarbon Phone App. Source: ECO2 LedgerTrading in Renewable Energy Certificates (called by various names in different markets) is important. The production, trade, distribution and consumption of renewable energy can be electronically documented and tracked with this method, creating carbon credits for verifiable carbon generation. In the developed world, this is an established and regulated market. In the developing world, where it is often voluntary, there can be a lot of issues: transparency of tracking, fraud and unacceptable transaction costs.Swiss-based Energy Web Foundation (EWF) is a nonprofit founded in 2017 that is developing publicly available and decentralized solutions designed specifically for the energy sector. EWF’s Energy Web Origin (EW Origin) is a suite of open-source and fully customizable software tools for building blockchain platforms for easy and efficient renewable energy sourcing in line with the existing standards and regulations.They have projects in Thailand, Turkey and El Salvador. Mercados Eléctricos16 (MERELEC), an electricity trading corporation operating across Mexico and Central America, is executing a pilot platform to assess a business case for the technical feasibility of a blockchain-based regional carbon credit trading marketplace. This is a fledgling project, started in 2019, and it has not been without challenges. Data acquisition has been a problem due to the diversity of devices. Lack of understanding of blockchain has been another. As these credits are voluntary, there seems to have been a lack of customers. But, good projects will overcome early difficulties.EZ Blockchain’s mobile bitcoin mining center in operation at a power plant. Source: EZ BlockchainA flare for flaresA lot of natural gas is lost, being flared (burned) instead of being used. It is potentially hazardous and often uneconomic to process and sell. This is very wasteful. EZ Blockchain, founded in the United States in 2017 by Sergii Gerasymovych, uses this waste gas. He explains, “We utilize that energy, convert it into electricity and mine Bitcoin.” The company’s product is a mobile data center that can be put on a gas site and use surplus gas to generate power — a neat trick.“There is a lot of energy in the power grid that is wasted. If there is excess power in the grid, we use it to mine Bitcoin. If there is a shortage, then our data center shuts down. It‘s balancing supply and demand.”The company is running flat out and installing new mining data centers every day. It has over 60 operating in the U.S. and Canada, some directly owned by EZ Blockchain, others by the energy companies themselves. They are building around a dozen more each month and are hooking their data centers up to renewable microgrids.“Our company is focused very much on incentivizing renewable energy,” Sergii says.“What I mean by that is renewable energy such as wind or solar requires a consistent user of power in order to be profitable. So, with the help of batteries, solar panels or wind turbines and cryptocurrency mining as a constant load, we can provide the companies that invested in renewable assets a much quicker return on investment. It can use the excess energy instead of being shut down when the wind blows, but there is not enough demand.”He adds:“The future is bright but there is a lot of work. We are at the stage where we are massively expanding. We literally hired ten people last week. So, the company’s growing exponentially.”Putting the pieces togetherDecentralized energy systems — local and low carbon — are the way forward for energy transmission and distribution. Couple that with IoT, AI, machine learning, big data and other technological innovations, as well as much more granular user control, a decentralized financial and accounting system will be required to ensure transparency, security and accountability. There‘s really only one technology that fits the bill: blockchain.