21 May 2018

ELECTRIFY — Southeast Asia’s first electricity marketplace — was founded in March 2017 by two senior executives from the electricity industry: Julius Tan and Martin Lim. This marketplace makes it faster and easier for both business and residential consumers to compare, select and transact electricity contracts through greater transparency and astute use of internet and e-commerce technologies.

In the past 12 months, we had transacted over 60GWh of electricity, representing a GMV of over S$10M, through our cloud-based platform.

At second half 2017, we started scoping growth plans and a radical upgrade of our platform through the use of blockchain. We embarked on an ambitious project to take complex electricity contracts and execute them on the Ethereum blockchain through the use of smart contracts, on a framework called Marketplace 2.0. Subsequently, we designed a scalable peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading platform, called Synergy, that would operate across a nation-wide main grid enabled by our own IoT infrastructure, the PowerPod.

We launched an ICO to fund this endeavour, which to date is one of most successful fundraisers in Singapore.

The ICO

The ELECTRIFY token is the ELEC which will be used to settle usage fees on our network. During the ICO, we established a hardcap of $30M; there was significant buy pressure, and we were over-subscribed at $1.3B. The crowdsale was designed with an allocation of $10M to incentivise community involvement and keep significant liquidity in the secondary market.

On 23 February 2018 we held our crowdsale in a controlled distribution format and successfully closed it within 10 hours, at a price of $0.08 per ELEC, with no bonuses paid out at either pre- or mainsale.

PROGRESS

In the last six months, since ELECTRIFY started on the ICO journey and began scoping for the new blockchain platform, we have had great support from both the blockchain and energy communities.

Jun Hasegawa, CEO of OmiseGo, and Wendell Davis, both key members of the Ethereum Community joined our board of advisors, which already included data scientists and energy researchers. Jeffrey Char, head of TEPCO Corporate Ventures, also joined our advisory board and provided us critical insights into the confluence of blockchain, energy utility and investments.

To date we have inked an early MOU with TEPCO, Japan’s largest power operator and fourth largest energy company in the world, to test and explore channels to deploy our energy solutions in Japan.

We have also been invited into discussions with some state grid operators in the APAC region for evaluation of our P2P energy trading solution. Among the interested collaborators are regional solar project developers, energy storage partners and companies with an interest in renewable energy attributes.

We’ve even signed an MOU with the region’s premier solar research facility, the Solar Energy Research Institute of Singapore (SERIS), to research and develop a tracking and settlement framework for renewable energy.

And pending paperwork is an MOU to explore how we can contribute to a greater SmartGrid solution with one of the world’s largest energy storage companies; that’s worthy of another Medium post all by itself.

SIX MONTHS IN THE FUTURE

ELECTRIFY is progressing well, keeping to the schedule of our ICO roadmap. We’ve already produced our first MVP of the PowerPod IoT framework, with a functioning sensor hub and data-visualisation dashboard. We’ve already got a collaboration with Streamr to explore the ability for end-users to monetise the data they own. Within the next few weeks, we’re going to enhance it with more live data and analyses.

We’ve started work on Marketplace 2.0, beginning with an updated UX/UI that will provide higher value for our retail electricity partners. One of the largest power companies in Singapore has already signed an agreement with us to develop smart contracts for their energy plans, and this will form the foundation for a new marketplace model. Heavily data-driven, this new marketplace will also include new AI modules to be jointly developed with a seasoned AI developer, SNAP Innovations, to deliver higher value to our partner and consumers.

Development of our blockchain is also being scoped with the architecture to be designed in the months to come. Working closely with the OmiseGo team, we’re looking to deploy this platform in tandem with the development of their network built on the Plasma scalability protocol and their ewallet SDK.

However, the most significant value we’re bringing to the table will be the deployment of the several proofs-of-concept for Synergy, our scalable P2P energy trading platform, in collaboration with several energy partners in Japan and Australia. Currently, we are selecting the appropriate solar assets to deploy PowerPod with as well as a select pool of commercial consumers to carry out the energy offtake and settlement.

ELECTRIFY is gaining significant traction in the regional energy space, with excellent progress along our developmental roadmap and a considerable number of projects in our pipeline.

We are already in discussions with some energy partners around the region to develop deeper business synergies and create more dynamic and scalable use cases.

BACKGROUND

Marketplace 2.0 — This will be among the world’s first electricity marketplaces on blockchain, allowing for more efficient transactions and greater transparencies through the use of smart contracts, to develop a blockchain infrastructure for energy transactions on a large scale.

Synergy — We’re not the earliest to the P2P energy trading space, but we are one of the very few in the world developing a working framework for scalable P2P energy trading across a main grid. The potential for affecting massive urban populations around the world cannot be ignored and is a significant gamechanger in the global energy space, with profound ramifications in the distributed energy resources (DER) sector impacting renewable energy.

PowerPod — Fundamental to both platforms is the ability to accurately gather and analyse data. The PowerPod started out as a simple IoT device that has now evolved into an IoT hub with a customisable data-visualisation dashboard. This too has long-term highly-scalable applications in the field of wide-scale data acquisition, allowing many different types of sensors to be deployed at relatively low cost.