The Grid+ team has been heads down focusing on scaling our operations. We’ve had quite a few success stories that we wish to share.

Hiring

In order to achieve the ambitious goals set forth in our white paper, we recognize the need to bring on a strong team across many verticals. This past month we interviewed 40+ candidates for a handful of roles and are excited to announce the following new additions to our team. We do not expect to continue to grow at this rate (doubling in the span of 30 days), but the following individuals are all critical hires at this juncture.

John Werner

John Werner has been hired as the CEO of GridPlus Texas Inc., our first retail energy provider with a specific focus on the Texas market. Prior to Grid+, John founded and operated a retail energy company which served energy to 50,000+ customers in ERCOT (Electric Reliability Council of Texas) and PJM. Throughout his 16-year tenure in the industry he has worked with several other retailers as an attorney and in numerous business-related roles. He also recently served on the ERCOT Board of Directors, which represents all of the electric retailers in Texas.

Gabe Shapiro

Gabe Shapiro is joining Grid+ as our Chief Legal Officer. Gabe is an attorney and technologist specializing in fintech, corporate and securities law and strategic transactions. He has extensive experience advising Fortune 500 technology companies in their mergers and acquisitions transactions under the umbrella of several AmLaw 100 law firms. In recent years, after becoming an avid student of, and advocate for, blockchain technologies, he has expanded his practice to advise emerging companies regarding blockchain-specific issues and transactions such as token sales. He is dedicated to advancing legal standards, best practices and dialogue around new technologies that solve pressing real-world issues. Further, Gabe was an integral member of the Hogan Lovells’ team who helped Grid+ on the token analysis for GRID. I’m personally very excited for Gabe to join for numerous reasons, but especially because we can now kick our BOLT workstream into high gear.

John Boyd

John is joining the Grid+ team as an embedded engineer. He has formal training as an electrical engineer with a graduate degree in mixed signal electronic design from Texas A&M and a background in semiconductor design. John also has experience in embedded hardware and embedded firmware development. When not at work, you are likely to find him tinkering behind a soldering iron or rock climbing at the local climbing gym.

Riza Forrester

Riza Forrester is joining Grid+ as a business analyst wherein he will work closely with myself on many operational and client service projects. Riza has 4 years of experience in the financial services industry, the majority spent at Morgan Stanley where he worked as a senior member at one of their Hedge Fund operations teams. Riza’s team handled $10+ billion in AUM and serviced over 2,000 investors. Riza is a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt and has aided Morgan Stanley in expediting a portion of their operational processes by up to 50%.

We expect to onboard another handful of hardware, software and Ethereum researchers in the coming months. Please check our careers page for all openings. We are very aggressively looking for Ethereum researchers to work directly with Alex on relay networks. If scalability work is of interest to you, please send us a note at careers@gridplus.io.

REP (Retail Energy Provider) Application

Our largest operational push since our token sale has been the submission of our REP application to the PUC (Public Utility Commission) of Texas. There are too many moving parts to enumerate in a single blog post, but this achievement required substantial effort by many of our team members, both from an operational and strategic perspective. In particular I would like to thank both Cole D’ambrosio and John Werner for the countless hours and long nights coordinating with vendors, professional service firms and various regulators to ensure the most robust submission possible.

The important takeaway here is that to serve energy to retail customers in Texas, you need to be approved by the PUC. This is a major milestone achieved in order to maintain the roadmap we identified in our whitepaper. The application deadline was January 17 to be eligible to participate in the upcoming test flight, wherein we will prove that our technology is able to interoperate with the systems used at ERCOT. If this deadline was missed, we would need to wait another four months to apply in the next application window. Our submission was covered in a local publication, which should provide some visibility to the market on the groundbreaking technology we are bringing to Texas. If you would like to learn more about what this process entails, please feel free to read up on ERCOT’s website.

Office

Alex recently tweeted the above photo which is the only picture we have of our office. You’re not missing much else since this is pretty much the entire space. We actually have two rooms, both about this size, which can fit four people in each. Currently, Karl and John Boyd will be the two daily frequenters, with the rest of the team flying in every few weeks to join them. I’m actually writing this update on a plane headed to Austin now to sign for an apartment, thus I’ll likely spend substantially more time in this office as well. If you’re a Grid+ enthusiast and find yourself in the area, drop us a line and you can check out our new space. If you’re lucky you may also run into Niran Babalola. He is a member of the ConsenSys mesh focused on the diligence spoke and he has been working out of our office as well. It’s nice to continue to work side-by-side with ConsenSys team members who are some of the most valuable contributors in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Engaging with Energy Companies

On a normal day, I end up talking to 2–4 energy companies who are interested in learning more about Grid+. Many of these are multinational, large entities who do not have extensive experience with blockchain, but are very interested in how they could improve their operations. Some of these may end up being partners who license our technology, or perhaps advisors to help guide us as we enter the global marketplace. In an attempt to help streamline these conversations, our team is contemplating the launch of a Grid+ affiliate program wherein we will host regular webinars to present our research on both Ethereum and our plans in the energy ecosystem. We are actively in discussions to bring on a team member to help organize and manage such an endeavor.

One such meeting this week was in person with Mathew Sachs, VP, Distributed Energy at National Grid Ventures. He offered a quote for his thoughts on the Grid+ model.

In our efforts to adapt with an increasingly decentralized, digitized and decarbonized energy landscape, National Grid Ventures remains keenly interested in how distributed technologies are shaping the future. Grid+’s strategy to leverage blockchain across a broad spectrum of energy consumers — from the tech-savvy solar adopter to the classic set-and-forget energy user — seemingly offers potential to scale today. Perhaps the future will come quicker than we anticipate.

Community

Quick shoutout as a thank you to many of our community members who have taken an active role in educating new comers and helping to make our Telegram group a great resource for all. Thank you CryptoDM, Rock Lobster and Banan for your tireless efforts — the entire team appreciates it.

Relays, Bridges, Sidechains, Extensions, Viaducts or some other name which conveys scaling

As some of you may have noticed, our CTO and Co-Founder Alex Miller has recently been releasing preliminary details regarding his evolving ideas on “relay networks” (which we also refer to interchangeably as “bridge networks” or more simply as “relays” or “bridges”). We believe relay networks represent an exciting new contribution to the ongoing discussion around scaling Ethereum, but what may be less obvious are the ways they were inspired by Grid+’s own scaling needs and dovetail with Grid+’s existing business model for smart agents and retail energy.

If you haven’t read about our relay networks concept, we strongly encourage you to check out our posts here, here and here. Broadly speaking, relay networks represent a new potential method of scaling Ethereum applications, and are thus meant to be considered alongside other (not necessarily mutually exclusive) scaling proposals such as those embodied in Plasma, Raiden, Polkadot and sharding.

Similar to Plasma, relay networks are being designed to facilitate scaling by establishing smart-contract-driven bridges between the highly secure (but throughput-bounded) Ethereum mainnet and smaller (private or public) networks or “sidechains” that have EVM smart contract functionality. As detailed in the above links, under Alex’s current design, opening a bridge between the mainnet and a sidechain requires depositing Ether or an ERC20 token as the “stake” in smart contracts on both the mainnet and the relevant sidechain. We refer to Ether or ERC20 tokens used in this way as “staking tokens” or “staking coins.”

One of the main reasons we are so excited about relay/bridge networks is that we believe they will be very well suited to run on the Grid+ agent devices that were summarized in our whitepaper, which we are currently continuing to develop. Maintaining a bridge requires three things:

Access to a staking token, configured when the bridge is set up Storage of a small amount of data in memory Sufficient connectivity and uptime

These are already planned features of our Grid+ agent devices, making them potentially well suited to implement relays. As detailed in the links above, under Alex’s conception of relay networks, proposers would have the opportunity to collect fees for maintaining a bridge, which would be similar to “mining rewards” in proof-of-work systems. As these fees were earned, they would be sent to the Grid+ agent serving as a proposer for a particular relay, and could then be used for other purposes as directed by the user (depending on the particular token being utilized to reward proposers, which may be Ether or any ERC20 token). These concepts fit in with our philosophy of allowing (and incentivizing) users to passively provide services via Grid+ agent devices.

Grid+ anticipates creating its own official EVM-based networks over which Grid+ and its customers could send and store data about their energy use or purchase electricity at greater scale than currently possible on the Ethereum mainnet. These networks would write data to a Grid+ sidechain, which would “relay” or “bridge” back to the Ethereum mainnet to harness the mainnet’s strong security and consensus features. We would likely then configure our Grid+ agents to connect to these “official” Grid+ sidechains/ relay networks by default. To maintain the quality and security of Grid+ applications, we currently anticipate that only official Grid+ agent devices will be “whitelisted” so that they may stake tokens to open official Grid+ relays. However, our current plan is to open-source the relay network software and Grid+ agent devices to the greatest extent reasonably possible, with the aim that anyone may adapt our technology to run their own relay networks and bridge any two EVM blockchains, whether on the Grid+ smart agent or another smart agent, device or software stack. And, of course, our plan remains that Grid+ smart agents will not only be available for sale to Grid+ energy customers, but, following our beta phase, also to the general public.

The issue arises as to what token to use for staking on these “official” bridges that run on Grid+ agents. Theoretically, it would be possible to use any number of tokens for staking, including Ether or any ERC20 token. Indeed, those who adapt our open source software to their own purposes would be able to select any token at all, including tokens that Grid+ has nothing to do with and does not stand to gain any benefit from. However, we currently anticipate that we will configure our Grid+ agent devices, official Grid+ relays, and official Grid+ sidechains to accept GRID tokens as the staking token on both sides of the bridge. We hope this will incentivize GRID holders to purchase Grid+ agents (when available) and participate in the process of scaling Ethereum. Of course, GRID tokens will still be redeemable for 500 kWh of electricity at wholesale prices through Grid+ Energy retailers (and, potentially, partners) as set forth in the GRID token terms and conditions posted on our website.

To expedite the process of developing our relay networks and associated technology, we will be putting up bounties to incentivize development of various aspects of our relay designs. Currently we have one posted bounty to incentivize the implementation of a Merkle proof in Solidity. We are also sponsoring EthDenver, where we will likely post additional bounties related to Ethereum scalability. If you’re at the event, please stop by to say hi to myself and Alex. Alex plans to give a talk focused on relay networks to further elaborate on our technical design decisions.

A few caveats:

Currently we do not anticipate creating a new type of token specifically as a staking token for our relay networks, nor do we anticipate accepting any tokens other than GRID tokens as staking coins for our official Grid+ relays and sidechains. We have not yet determined what token(s) will be used to reward proposers for opening and maintaining Grid+ relays. It is important to note that our work on relay networks — and Grid+’s technology and business generally — remains preliminary and we reserve the right to create new tokens, to accept tokens other than GRID as staking coins and to distribute tokens other than GRID as rewards for proposers. We are still in the process of fine-tuning the interplays among the GRID token and our planned BOLT token, Grid+ smart agent, energy retail business and relay networks, and may need to modify or supplement our plans, models and features as our business evolves. We plan to update the GRID token terms and conditions with additional legal details governing the planned staking feature of GRID tokens closer to the launch of our relay network implementation, and such definitive terms and conditions, rather than the statements above, will determine the rights and obligations of Grid+ and GRID holders in relation to the staking feature of GRID tokens. 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.

Conclusion

We’ve made great strides this past month in augmenting our team and researching areas that will be of critical importance for our operations. If you would like to become involved, please join our Telegram group, or follow us on Twitter. Looking forward to delivering in 2018.