WePower: The Idea, History and Binance Drama of a Green ICO

When currency becomes decentralized, it is only a matter of time before the products and services exchanged with those tokens become decentralized themselves. What would happen if energy itself became the next product that entered the realm of decentralized economies? This is the question that the founders of WePower set out to answer with their new crypto project.

What is WePower?

WePower defines itself as a blockchain based green energy trading platform. Its job is to be able to provide tokens to and for companies that specialize in renewable energy sources and other green or eco-friendly companies that need to raise capital for their projects. The system works by having the tokens (titled WPR) be represented not just as money but as energy in kilowatts. One single WPR token also represents 1kWh. Another way of framing it is that 8000 WPR is worth one Ethereum token, which is roughly $870 US at the time of writing this. In other words, or numbers, one single WPR is worth almost 11 cents.

WePower was founded by several people working in the energy industry across various European countries, including Estonia and Lithuania. Their philosophy is predicated on the concept of fixing the problem of companies using dirty energy sources (anything associated with fossil fuels or CO2 gas emissions) by going from bottom to top, and not top to bottom. What this means is that changing energy regulations from the top first is too difficult and takes decades to make any actionable changes. This is due to the red tape, politics and bureaucracy of any given company, industry or multi-national which deals in these kinds of energy sources.

WePower takes the opposite approach of trying to change the world’s reliance and dependence on dirty energy by starting with the smaller start-ups who incentivize using greener or clean energy, and the everyday citizens who can help jump start their projects. Thus the “bottom-to-top” name embedded in their mission statement. WePower is essentially an independent energy supplier and funding company for people trying to make the very infrastructure of energy companies more environmentally friendly. Think of them as a blockchain-based kind of GoFundMe or Kickstarter for these companies, if you will.

The initial coin offering for WePower ended in mid February and was fairly successful. It met its fundraising goal of $40,000,000 and sold 45% of its token reserve, 130,050,000 out of 289,000,000 WPR.

But as ambitious and righteous as their goals may be, WePower was recently the subject of a mild controversy involving Binance a very short while ago. Binance.com was holding its monthly “Community Coin of the Month” poll in order to highlight the most anticipated and revered new and upcoming crypto service. WePower’s staff did something that was questionable in order to influence the results of this poll: they promised users and clients to be rewarded with WPR tokens if they voted for WePower to win.

Community Coin of the Month or Not?

While we don’t want this story to overshadow the good intentions behind the project itself, and while we’re not saying they “rigged an election” or anything so severe, it generally does go against the fairness of a democratic process to have one party be incentivizing voters with prizes. In a political context, this would be defined as a bribe by picking one candidate over the other, and since crypto tokens do indeed have monetary value despite being decentralized, the word bribe does fit in this context as well.

But that is not where this story ends. One of the other candidates in Binance’s poll, Elastos (titled ELA) genuinely did rig the voting by using bots to boost their results. The poll ended on February the 25th and the results are as listed: Elastos came in first place with over 150,000 votes (63%) and WePower came in second place with just under 60,000 votes (25%). As we’ve already implied, none of these results can be reliably trusted. First place used bots to fudge the numbers, and second place essentially paid their voters which goes against the very essence of any democratic process.

While Binance has yet to comment on this incident, we highly advise that anyone who normally pays attention to this poll take it with a huge grain of salt for this month. Without cheating being perpetrated from both top entrants, it is entirely unclear how the polls would have panned out in a fair environment.

Despite this drama, we still stand by the ambition and the creativity that lies within the WePower team. We hope they learn from their mistake and hope that it doesn’t tarnish their reputation and their future goals. It would be a shame for a project that promises to improve the world to go to waste over one single misstep along the way.