Markets in the past quarter seem to have no correlation with the speed of development in which our communities are building. This is probably a blessing as we can stay focused without the incessant speculators constantly dominating the conversation about how best to make money in a bull market. Our team, like many others in this space, have continually kept our heads down and the past quarter has been our most prolific in terms of engineering feats.

Hiring

Our last progress report outlined the hiring of four new team members: John Werner, Gabe Shapiro, John Boyd, and Riza Forrester. We’ve continued the aggressive level of growth in hiring engineers this past quarter.

We’ve augmented our team with the following additions:

Sean Hudson

Sean has developed software for embedded devices since 1996. He started using Linux personally in 1999 and began developing embedded Linux devices professionally in 2006. He is an Emeritus member of the YP Advisory Board, a member of the OpenEmbedded Board, and part of the devicetree.org Technical Steering Committee. As a newcomer to the cryptocurrency ecosystem, he is excited at the prospect of creating a device that will bring cryptocurrency into people’s homes.

Dan Veenstra

Dan is a data engineer with a penchant for building cutting edge systems. Having graduated from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University in 2013, Dan is a self taught engineer who has built systems including a multi-petabyte data warehouse, a streaming analytics platform for millions of connected IoT devices, and a near realtime data lake. As a big believer in the power of better information to better the world, Dan is looking forward to helping Grid+ fundamentally improve how people interact with the electric grid.

John Hemmick

John is joining the Grid+ team as an embedded engineer. He has a Computer Engineering degree from the University of Houston where he focused in robotics, circuitry design, and embedded systems, picking up 1st in the IEEE Region 5 Circuitry and Robotics design competitions. His professional career includes work writing firmware for rack-mount server management processors, embedded linux applications for networking appliances, and firmware for 802.15.4 Zigbee / Thread smart home reference designs for the IoT. His off-work interests include tabletop roleplaying games, gardening, cooking, and throwing pottery.

Joshua Ledbetter

Joshua grew up in Ireland and moved to the US at the age of 18. He is self taught in front end development and always looking to learn and expand his skill set. Joshua joins Grid+ from Tastemade, where he focused on their proprietary content and data platform. There he worked on features across multiple departments, building tools that help power their content creation and distribution. Outside of front end work Joshua has interests in philosophy, psychology, and reading science fiction.

Brandon Mayes

Brandon is joining the team as a full-stack engineer. He brings a wealth of experience creating highly scalable, fault-tolerant APIs and services. While most of his work in a previous life revolved around Java, he has most recently been dabbling in Node.js and is enjoying every minute of it. While not writing code you might find him on a disc golf course, a pool table, or the nearest running trail.

This Summer, Grid+ will also have two interns joining our team:

Sam Faries

Sam is a Master of Environmental Management Candidate at Yale University studying the connections between energy and the environment. He has focused his studies on the rapidly changing electricity sector and is particularly interested in grid edge technology and energy economics. Prior to graduate school he attended the University of Texas at Austin, conducted ecological research in the Rocky Mountains, and worked on a Department of Energy-funded biofuels research project. Outside of school, he enjoys all kinds of outdoor recreation, especially backpacking and fly-fishing.

Josh Dubin

Josh Dubin is a law student at Washington University in St. Louis, focusing on corporate, intellectual property, and technology law. Since his introduction to distributed ledger technology, Josh has been dedicated to learning how to promote blockchain applications in a legally compliant manner. With a background in economics and political science, Josh is particularly motivated by the prospect of leveraging the “internet of value” in order to help end-users reap the benefits of decentralization. In his free time, Josh enjoys playing chess, playing the trumpet, and playing with his cat, Mustafa.

As always, open positions at Grid+ will be posted on our website. Please send inquiries to careers@gridplus.io.

Retail Energy Provider License

We are still in the process of working with the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) to be granted our license. The PUCT has been very prompt and responsive throughout the entire application process. Last week we provided further clarity on some of the more exotic subjects found in our whitepaper, such as p2p energy trading. In March, John Werner, the CEO of GridPlus Texas, issued a statement to clarify any ambiguity in our business model. I believe we should have full clarity on our application by the middle of May, just in time to kick off our beta testing program.

Beta Program

Our team has been working hard towards readying our technology to flow electricity to our first set of customers. An integral step in connecting many disparate systems is to have a small subset of customers provide regular feedback. We are extremely fortunate to have an enthusiastic and engaging community who responded to our call to arms with haste. Within hours of posting a request for interested parties in the CenterPoint and Oncor regions, we received a few dozen applicants. We will be following up in the coming weeks to select five participants in each region for our first round of testing.

During the beta program, we will be offering a below market fixed price for the cost of electricity. On our back end systems, we will mock out various billing scenarios had the end user instead opted for a DA (Day Ahead), RT (Real Time), or a combinatory product of the two which we refer to as a DART. Before offering more complexity to our customers, we need to understand the data flows through our systems, external providers and agents — the beta program will be a starting point for this learning.

For those who are interested in participating, please sign up on our website. Our plan is to have another round of testers in the August/September timeframe to coincide with early agent deployment. We are looking for adventurous individuals who desire to play an active role by providing feedback and testing new functionality that may potentially have bugs. This group will also be the first set of users who install agents in their home with minimal supervision. We plan to use the feedback received to improve our documentation and learn of any installation and operating edge cases before our production deployments.

Agent Update

Grid+ is building an integrated software and hardware solution with the aim of drastically improving deficiencies that exist in the energy ecosystem. We desire to improve the fragility of our grid, and open up markets for all participants. In working towards these goals, we’ve ideated on the capabilities of our agent device. The past few months have been elucidating for us as we started mocking out services that can be run directly on our agents.

When we realized that thousands of disparate agents can all be networked together, we discovered some nifty functionality that will not only improve the infrastructure for the world of electricity, but also for the cryptocurrency ecosystem. We intend to patent the relevant designs. Once the relevant patent applications have been filed, we will be in a position to provide a more in depth technical unveiling of these ideas.

These past months have brought a significant upgrade to the agent’s architecture. While the hardware team has been busy building the board and defining the driver stack, Alex has been revamping the functionality which will be exposed by the agent.

More updates and unveiling of features to be showcased in the coming months.

First Agent Run

Beta program participants will receive the first agents we produce at Grid+. This first run will likely take place in mid to late August, and we project the batch size to be ~30 or so agents. We will also provide a handful to ConsenSys spoke teams to test functionality and features we have been developing in stealth.

We have been working with an external design studio on the agents. We are extremely pleased with the progress made to date, and believe the agent will not only be a functional piece of hardware, but also an aesthetically pleasing one. There are still a handful of design considerations to take into account prior to releasing to the public.

Blockchain Scaling

Our team has been blown away by the speed at which the Ethereum community is ideating and developing scaling solutions. Plasma has gone from a theoretical description to early specifications at lightning pace. Our own early bridge designs were surprisingly similar to Plasma in many ways except for the ability to make main-net withdrawals, a simple yet powerful feature that has pushed us in the Plasma direction (thanks again to Jeff Coleman for showing Alex and myself the light at EthDenver). For more thoughts on our team’s approach, check out Alex’s recent blog posts (one and two) on the topic.

We are working on additional scaling measures, outside of Plasma, that specifically utilize functionality offered by our agent device. Not much can be said at the moment, but we are making tremendous progress on this front. Scaling is important for our solution as we desire our agents to pay for energy in near real time. In the future, this means all customers would post-pay for energy consumption after every 15 minute pricing interval. If we have 10,000 customers, this would mean (10,000)*(60/15)*(24) or about 1mm transactions per day just in energy payments. These payments will very likely be on Plasma or a derivative of such.

Technological challenges aside, it is important to note that in many jurisdictions, including Texas, there will also be regulatory hurdles to pricing and billing on such short intervals. The existing energy industry norms and regulatory frameworks simply are not built to accommodate many of the cutting-edge technological breakthroughs we hope to offer. We intend to work with regulators, industry groups and legislators to seek waivers, interpretations and changes in law to the extent necessary to fully realize the promises of our technology in a legally compliant manner.

Stable Coins

It seems that the recent market downturn has brought renewed interest into the idea of stable coins. Huge shoutout to Andy and the entire Maker team for shipping the DAI stablecoin. It has held up to extreme levels of stress and seems to be a fantastic decentralized solution to a very real problem in our ecosystem. We outlined plans for a stablecoin in our whitepaper, and have been ideating on potential implementations. The actual technology to do so isn’t a challenge, but the regulatory front is. We will not move forward on this vertical until we have regulatory permission to do so, and will be ramping up efforts as we move closer to our first production run of agent devices in Q1, 2019. We also will continue to consider other alternatives, such as leveraging DAI or other stablecoins rather than developing our own.

GRID Tokens

The first tranche of GRID tokens for founders and ConsenSys will unlock in the nearish term as described in our whitepaper. ConsenSys and the founders have all agreed to leave the tokens untouched in their current smart contract for the next six months, with the decision of how to handle those tokens thereafter to be revisited.

Wyoming has made a splash as a welcome home for crypto

Regulatory Front

Regulatory arbitrage has often been cited as a value for open crytpocurrency networks. The ability to move value across borders without permission from oppressive governments or institutions has proven to be at least one of the fundamental value propositions of bitcoin. Over the past few years, really since the advent of Ethereum, we’ve seen governments begin to fight over attracting the top talent to grow their operations within a given set of borders, a different but important type of regulatory arbitrage. Overly restrictive regulation could prove irrevocably damaging to their jurisdictions by driving away innovators from providing services.

On the bright side, recent proceedings have shown that innovative governments understand the potential impact these open networks will have on their constituents. In the past few months, Wyoming has leaped to the forefront of forward thinking jurisdictions in the United States. They recently passed House Bill 70 which removes the need to comply with state securities and money transmission laws when selling an open blockchain token. The Grid+ team has been in contact with a few integral team members who helped move these bills forward, one of which is Rob Jennings of Wyoming Blockchain Services, LLC. We have been in contact about Grid+ supporting efforts to help bring about a deregulated energy market to Wyoming. Rob had the following to say about our platform:

Grid+ is going to launch a thousand discussions moving forward. The tech is disruptive because it puts buying power in hands of the customer and results in more choices, lower costs and better service. When local governments are looking for new solutions to keep electric rates affordable for consumers I think Grid+ is the first stop in that discussion.

Disclaimer

The forward-looking statements in this update are subject to numerous assumptions, risks and uncertainties which are subject to change over time. There are many risk factors, including those relating to blockchain and cryptographic technology generally, as well Grid+’s business, operations and results of operations, that could cause our actual results or developments anticipated by us not to be realized or, even if substantially realized, to fail to achieve any or all of the benefits that could be expected therefrom, We reserve the right to change the plans, expectations and intentions stated herein at any time and for any reason, in our sole and absolute discretion, and we undertake no obligation to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future developments or otherwise. ACCORDINGLY, WE RECOMMEND THAT YOU DO NOT RELY ON, AND DO NOT MAKE ANY FINANCIAL DECISION OR INVESTMENT BASED ON, THE STATEMENTS CONTAINED IN THIS UPDATE — INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO ANY SELLING OR TRADING OF GRID TOKENS, ETHER OR ANY OTHER CRYPTOGRAPHIC OR BLOCKCHAIN TOKEN, OR THE SECURITIES OF ANY COMPANY.