Community, hello from Estonia!

It is time for WePower’s engineering team update. This time, we have asked our community management team to gather the most trending WePower engineering development related questions which have been shimmering around in our social platforms.

Please take a closer look what is our community most interested in and what the answers to these development questions are.

1. What is currently WePower’s engineering teams working on in Europe and Australia?

Currently, the team is working on the internal non-public proof-of-concept platform. The platform functionality and logic has been broken into several “blocks”, currently they are: auction, trading, blockchain, portfolio management and migrating the community to an auction. These are the functional building blocks of the public WePower platform. The main effort is currently on the auction block. Release of the Alpha version of the platform is planned in April.

WePower is projected to delivering fundraising auctions to its pipeline of renewable projects in Q4 of this year. This is the current and main focus of the engineering team. Piloting in Estonia is an associated challenge — certain necessary technology proofs need to be completed in order to make sure auctions are reliable.

Despite the fact that the Engineering team is geographically distributed, they are all one team. It’s true that the parallel development in Australia within the confines of the Startupbootcamp activity might be rolled into the over development, nothing is treated as independent. The team uses Agile software development techniques as its design principal, so the geographical location of the teams are irrelevant to the piece of programming that they are working on.

2. What is current pilot projects status in Estonia? What are the next steps in launching pilot?

The team is working with Elering to determine the feasibility of using Ethereum for smart contract application and transparency for the long-term. This is all possible in theory, but work has begun in earnest to determine if it is possible in the real world and working with high volumes of tokenized energy. That is why working with Elering and having access to their Estifeed data hub, which has all data about produced and consumed energy in Estonia, is so important not only for WePower but to the energy industry.

We are also working on preparing to access and inject the anonymous user data into the platform to test tokenization of energy. The pilot is launched and ongoing! Our Estonian tokenization project that we plan to launch in August should be the biggest blockchain application in the energy sector giving a major push towards energy digitalization globally.

The Elering pilot will be ongoing and evolving, as the long term goal is to also connect 220 Energia and Eleon windmills in Estonia into a fully working pilot ecosystem that could support development of all three phases of engineering goals as laid out in the WePower whitepaper.

3. What technical developments have to be implemented so WePower could be launched and energy producers could start raising money for their energy projects?

The above mentioned “auction block” is the piece that is being worked on the most at this moment. There are also non-technical activities currently underway such as building the pipeline of renewable energy producers that will be the first “projects” to come on to the platform and sell energy tokens to support their development. The goal is to have not only solar projects, but also wind and hydro projects because all “three energies” present different technical integration scenarios.

The WePower business team is preparing a separate update, but I can ensure that both teams are moving forward very fast. Stay tuned!

4. Has there been any major milestones accomplished last few weeks on infrastructure or technology?

The team uses Agile development as a design principal. Within that they use a concept inspired by scrum, specifically the idea of development sprints. A sprint is a week of time that focuses on specific development goals or objectives and evolves as development progresses. If a mayor milestone has been achieved — the community will know about it. In the last weeks the design and scope of the first platform release — that will allow the first renewable energy auctions to start marketing their auctions — is nearing scope lock. So we hope to have it out in April with the corresponding energy token model that we plan to use for the first auctions.

5. When will the results of the pilot project be announced?

I would like to start by saying that our platform first alpha release is planned for second half of April. We will be gradually inviting more and more people to check out how the platform works, give feedback & suggestions.

Soon after the first release we will have an update allowing registration of potential green energy producers and energy buyers across the globe.

The full Estonian energy tokenization is planned for August. Our team is working together with Elering’s engineers to show the world the biggest blockchain application in the energy sector! Our team is planning a very special event for this occasion, so get ready to save the date!