The progress in more detail: Q1 of 2018

The start of the year was marked by a major development. We partnered with Estonian TSO Elering with the aim to put nationwide energy consumption and production data on the Ethereum blockchain and tokenize it. This joint project was a turning point with two innovators working together to test blockchain’s applicability in one of the most fundamental industries to our daily lives — energy.

In the first quarter of 2018, Elering provided us with a year’s worth of real-world energy production and consumption data which allowed our engineers to kick off the pilot project.

In March, we were fortunate to welcome Peter H. Diamandis, a well-known entrepreneur, founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation and an Executive Founder of Singularity University; Maja Vujinovic, the CEO of OGroup, ex-CIO of Emerging Tech at GE Digital; Trevor Townsend, Managing Director at Startupbootcamp Energy Australia; and You (Ricky) Li, Ex-CME energy derivative product manager, experienced energy and crypto trader as the members of the WePower Advisory Board. The board was formed to accelerate our business further and turn our vision of a greener sustainable living into a reality.

Q2 of 2018

In April, we graduated from StartupBootcamp (SBC) in Melbourne. SBC is the world’s second largest accelerator program, and it chose WePower to be its first portfolio company using a tokenized system to incentivize and facilitate green energy adoption — a major achievement for our company. As part of the SBC Energy Australia program, WePower will continue to receive support from some of the biggest energy companies in Australia.

Following SBC, WePower signed a strategic partnership with Energy Australia, a gas and electricity retailer with over 2.6 million customers. To our surprise, it became evident that Australia was a greater fit for our solution than most of the other countries we had on our roadmap. Read more about Australia’s market readiness from our recent What is hot in WePower article.

We also launched the alpha version of the WePower platform which allows corporate energy buyers to enter into direct contracts with energy producers in order to buy green energy at below market rates. Even though the alpha version was a demo of what the future platform would be like, it quickly attracted the attention of thousands of interested users.

Q3 — Q4 of 2018

The second half of 2018 came with even bigger milestones. We signed a major partnership with TFS Green, the Australian subsidiary of Tradition, one of the world’s largest inter-dealer brokers. Bloomberg featured the news in a dedicated article headlined Tradition to Make Energy Unit ‘Obsolete’ With Blockchain that describes how the energy market is soon expected to change for the better.

During our collaboration with TFS we were assured of our decision to focus on helping businesses go green by allowing them to start benefiting from the increasingly lower price of renewables. To our knowledge there are no great solutions for companies currently in the market to buy green energy fast, transparently and at a good price.

Only the largest corporations have found the existing option called a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) suitable. Unfortunately, PPAs aren’t a good solution for most businesses as they come with a lengthy legal process that takes about a year to get signed. They’re expensive and entirely illiquid. What we’re offering is a digital, standardized approach to this process.

In October, we launched the first results of our revolutionary energy tokenization pilot project in which we successfully uploaded 26,000 hours of energy data to blockchain creating 39 billion Smart Energy Tokens. The pilot proved that WePower’s platform is capable of handling large amounts of energy data. It means that we can use blockchain to bring trust and auditable transparency to the energy sector due to it being a public distributed ledger. With blockchain all records are time-stamped and made public which provides buyers with certainty that their money is going directly to a green energy producer.

2018 was also extraordinary thanks to the start of our collaboration with The Climate Group, which kicked off with WePower participating at the Climate Week NYC in September. Just two months later, at the RE-Source event together with Amazon, Facebook, Google, IKEA, Microsoft and 100 forward-thinking companies, we signed a declaration which calls on policymakers to remove all regulatory and administrative barriers to corporate sourcing of renewable energy.