Lition is a blockchain built for businesses, with a layer 2 blockchain infrastructure that works on top of Ethereum to enable commercial usage of dApps. The Lition protocol adds additional features to the Ethereum mainnet such as privacy, scalability and even deletability for GDPR compliance. We recently sat down with the Lition team to ask some questions.

Please introduce yourself and provide a short summary of Lition

My name is Richard Lohwasser, founder and CEO of Lition. Thanks for having me.

I received my PhD in energy economics and have been a strategist, researcher, and consultant in the energy sector for over 10 years. I most recently served as managing director for operations at one of Germany’s leading independent energy suppliers, ExtraEnergie, at that time overseeing more than 350 employees and revenue exceeding $1 billion dollars.

I started programming at an early age and became increasingly interested in blockchain over the years as it became clear to me that it was the type of innovation the German energy industry needed.

At Lition, we are developing a public-private blockchain infrastructure with deletable data features that will enable businesses to bring innovative blockchain applications to the mass-market that are legally compliant with data protection laws such as the GDPR.

How can Lition help businesses embrace blockchain?

Commercial blockchain needs come in all shapes and sizes and the available platforms simply do not meet all the regulatory requirements of the business world. We saw this first hand when we began developing our P2P energy trading platform. Every available solution had its drawbacks when it came to speed, fees, security or scalability. There was also the important matter of European data protection regulations (GDPR). The EU enforces strict data deletion mandates and if a company doesn’t comply with these regulations it’s possible to be fined a lot of money.

We were not satisfied with any of the existing blockchain solutions. So, we decided to build our own public-private blockchain infrastructure that allows for consumer data to be deleted upon request. We partnered with one of the world’s largest software companies, SAP, to develop a “hybrid” blockchain, which combines what we believe to be the best aspects of private and public blockchains for enterprise use cases. SAP CTO and Executive Board Member Dr. Jürgen Müller is an advisor to Lition and co-author of our technical paper.

We’re very excited about moving blockchain away from niche use cases and into the mass market where it impacts peoples’ everyday lives, just as we’ve done with Lition Energy.

Now we want to provide the technology that paves the way for other businesses to do the same.

Can you explain Lition Energy and what the recent growth surge means for Lition & LIT?

My co-founder Kyung-Hun Ha and I have worked in the German utilities market for many years. The system is too complex, non-transparent and very backwards.

Germany already had the highest electricity costs in Europe and prices continued to rise despite high profit margins. Multinational intermediaries have too much power and large utilities take advantage of cheap green energy certificates to market dirty energy as green energy.

Again and again we tried to push for innovation but we were turned down each time. The industry is only focused on profit.

So, we decided the best solution would be to cut the middlemen out completely. We left our jobs in 2017 and started developing technology to prove that a more efficient blockchain-based P2P trading model could work. That’s how Lition Energy was started.

We built a peer to peer energy trading platform that connects clean energy producers and suppliers directly with end users on the blockchain. Our dApp was launched in April 2018, and we now serve customers in over 1000 cities across Germany. Right now, we connect up to 100 new energy customers per day.

We are able to provide consumers access to energy at a cheaper price while also empowering them to choose their green energy type and preferred supplier. By removing the middlemen and digitalization, we are able to save customers an average of 20% on their utility bills, and power producers are seeing increased revenues of up to 30%.

The growth of Lition Energy is important to the token because all transactions that take place on the Energy sidechain are paid for in LIT. A buy order is triggered to sync the energy demand with the supply for each customer. There is an increase in transactions with each and every customer we onboard.

Transaction fees are then distributed to anyone in our community that chooses to stake their tokens. There are currently over 10 million tokens staked and sidechain transaction fees are providing a nice return for our community. Users will also have the option to become validators and run their own nodes once we are out of the beta stage.

Lition has a number of impressive partnerships. How will these partnerships help the growth of Lition?

Partnerships are the most strategic ways to scale innovation and solve complex challenges. Attempting to do everything alone will not get you very far. We are very proud of the relationships we’ve established and confident everyone will soon see how important they are in helping Lition to build awareness, reach new customers, and broaden our technology.

Can you talk us through LIT, the token burning process and how important LIT tokens are to the ecosystem you’re building?

Yes, we have burned or announced burns for quite a bit of tokens lately so this is a great question. We’ve lowered the total supply from 145 million to 100.5 million through a series of recent and upcoming token burns. You can view the details in this article.

As far as the burning process itself, the tokens are sent to a dead-end ERC-20 address (0x0) and total circulating supply in the ERC20 contract is reduced.

For the second part of the question, The Lition token is used to drive all Lition sidechains. All transaction fees are paid in LIT. As I mentioned before, Tokens can also be used to stake or run a node in order to help strengthen the network and earn a share of the transaction fees generated.

Additionally, we have been working our way through the legal requirements necessary to add the Lition token as a payment option for our Energy customers. You’ll see this on our roadmap for Q3 of this year.

What are your biggest goals for 2020?

Our 2020 roadmap would answer this question best. You can view it here.

Thanks for taking the time to answer our questions. Do you have anything else you want to talk about or hint at before you go?

Thanks again for having me. All I can say is that we have a busy few months ahead of us. We can’t let the cat out of the bag yet on anything that is still in development, but we will have some important updates in the near future. I encourage everyone to join our Telegram community or follow us on Twitter to stay up-to-date with our progress.



https://t.me/LitionEnergy

https://twitter.com/Lition_Block