ArcBlock Assisted ELONCITY in Building the Future Developer Ecosystem

By Robert Mao, Founder & CEO of ArcBlock

Preface Not long ago, ArcBlock became ELONCITY’s strategic partner, and I was honored to be the technical advisor of ELONCITY. ELONCITY is a very challenging program and I really respect its founder, Andy Li, who is also my superior. He is also an expert in technology and is more experienced than I am. It is an honor to be able to work side by side with him to explore the world that combines blockchain and renewable energy. This article briefly introduces the technical and commercial logic behind our cooperation with ELONCITY.

What is ELONCITY?

To sum it up, ELONCITY tries to build a community power facility by using the “decentralized new energy community power supply + energy storage equipment”, and gradually complete the group grid connection of the smart grid micro community in order to establish a decentralized community electricity exchange market.

In North America, governments subsidize solar roofs, but most families have not applied energy storage equipment to their lives. The electric energy generated by solar energy cannot be exchanged, resulting in energy waste. Many local power companies, such as the Puget Sound Energy (PSE) in Seattle, also provide household solar power services, and provide subsidies to families that use solar power. However, it is not economical at all. The installation and maintenance of solar equipment costs a lot, while both the reduction of the electricity fee and the government’s subsidy are limited. It will take about 10 years or even longer to reach a balance of income and expenditure. The lack of energy storage may lead to a waste of energy, but the buy back price of electricity companies is really low.

Elon Musk’s Tesla acquired SolarCity in 2016, and then Tesla launched sine solar rooftop products and energy storage equipment Powerwal. Currently, Tesla’s products have better user experience than those of some electricity companies. However, in addition to paying for the high price and high installation costs (especially solar roofs), buyers only use the generated electricity for their household and will waste extra energy.

ELONCITY has moved forward based on the above-mentioned technology. Firstly, it provides a microgrid system, which is equivalent to organizing adjacent users rather than letting users use energy individually. Moreover, it uses blockchain technology to establish a power transaction market which is based on the microgrid. With the open and transparent incentive mechanism established by blockchain, the generation of new energy became a “mining game”, which encourages users to produce, reserve and share energy. From these two perspectives, it is a great initiative and stride, as well as a major innovation of the application of blockchain technology.

How ELONCITY Uses Blockchain

ELONCITY itself is a microgrid system in the first place. Inside the ELONCITY system, blockchain is only part of its support system, and its main business is the power system. To ELONCITY, energy storage equipment and technology are very important. Energy storage will help community residents in the micro smart grid enjoy greater flexibility in electricity consumption. It will also reduce the cost of electricity consumption (including network maintenance costs), simplify the exchange of electricity, provide network partition, reduce the negative impact of the network, and improve the safety of electricity usage.

For some new developing communities that are located on the edge of the large power grid, ELONCITY’s new power solution will be much more cost-effective than the construction of transformer facilities, the expansion of the power transmission and distribution, and the continuous maintenance. For the community that has access to the existing large grid, or a company that provides a distribution for all types of regional power networks, ELONCITY has a solution to reform and improve efficiency. Electricity users in the community will be able to realize the price gap between self-generating community electricity and commercial electricity consumption.

ELONCITY will provide an energy network protocol (ECTP) and a variety of power storage devices that meet different uses. The ELONCITY power grid basic protocols are distributed into more community micro smart grids, so that more regional power networks can reach energy self-sufficiency by efficient energy exchange. The core of the protocol is a blockchain-based exchange system, which can recommend the fair exchanging price within the network in real time through an AI algorithm. With the Token (ECT) issued by ELONCITY, dynamic pricing and real-time power exchanging are completed. What’s more, ECT’s intrinsic value will also be revealed by ELONCITY’s own power storage devices. It is possible to acquire ECT tokens by purchasing the household energy storage equipment (POMCube NetZero) which is compatible with the protocol. ECT will also be used to subsidize the community to support ELONCITY’s energy network protocol, and further reduce the cost of energy storage equipment.

ELONCITY applies the technology of Cybermiles in the implementation of blockchain, which is the first application side chain of Cybermiles and an extension mode besides Plasma. It is worth mentioning that Cybermiles is ArcBlock’s strategic partner, and ArcBlock’s support for Cybermiles makes it easier for ELONCITY to take advantage of Cybermiles technology.

ArcBlock & ELONCITY

Both ArcBlock and ELONCITY lay emphasis on technical idealism and engineering practice. The ArcBlock’s core technology is the application platform, while ELONCITY’s core technology is the microgrid technology. Blockchain is the foundation and bridge for these two kinds of technologies. Therefore, it is reasonable to establish strategic cooperation between the two companies. ELONCITY’s application of blockchain technology is based on microgrid technology, which also reflects the value of ArcBlock platform on application support and development. Not only can we help the developers of software applications, but we can also help various different industries to implement the blockchain solution, so that blockchain technology will be applied to all fields of life and become the infrastructure of future society.

The cooperation between ArcBlock and ELONCITY will be a long-term strategic cooperation, so we will start from the very beginning and gradually implement in more areas. The easiest way to start cooperation is the peripheral ecosystem of ArcBlock’s Open Chain Access Protocol technology. ELONCITY uses Cybermiles technology in the implementation of blockchain, and the strategic and technical cooperation between Cybermiles and ArcBlock has already begun from the beginning of the development of both sides. In fact, ArcBlock plays a role as a bridge in the technical cooperation between ELONCITY and Cybermiles. We believe that the mode of cooperation within the three companies may even become a model, laying the foundation for more technical cooperation in the future.

Open Chain Access Protocol of ArcBlock

Open Chain Access Protocol (OCAP) is an open source protocol designed and implemented by ArcBlock. It provides an abstract middle layer to access the lower blockchain so that the upper layer can easily run on different underlying blockchains. The OCAP service layer provides a unified interface and query language for a variety of upper applications. In the OCAP, we use GraphQL as a query language, so that OCAP can directly use the tools and libraries in the GraphQL ecology, and greatly reduce the learning cost for developers.

ELONCITY is one of the application scenario of ArcBlock’s Open Chain Access Protocol. This shows that supporting OCAP is of great value not only to the developer community, but also to the providers of the blockchain technology. The new blockchain application providers can get more developer support through OCAP and quickly access the developer community. On one hand, part of the modules in ELONCITY are used as OCAP applications to access the underlying blockchain using Cybermiles technology through OCAP. On another hand, with the OCAP adapter, ELONCITY can provide its own high-level functions to developers via OCAP.

ArcBlock Assists ELONCITY in Building the Future Developer Ecosystem

ELONCITY will immediately embrace the entire developer ecology by supporting the Open Chain Access Protocol. In the early stages of the program, ELONCITY was easier to implement its own business application logic on the blockchain through OCAP’s support for Cybermiles. In the late stage of the program, ELONCITY could provide its own business through OCAP, allowing developers to build more applications together. OCAP’s cross — chain access enables developers to have unlimited imagination and develop various kinds of energy related applications, or even new energy exchange types. From another perspective, ELONCITY’s open application development interface for ArcBlock developers has also enriched the types of applications in the ArcBlock ecosystem.

The challenge for ELONCITY program is that it tries to integrate microgrid technology, blockchain technology, and the new generation of energy exchange market protocols, which are all challenging. As a result, it needs teamwork between current partners, developers and future ecological partners with all kinds of new energy. For now, ArcBlock has an important mission to assist our partners in building a developer ecology, and we are honored and deeply aware of the responsibilities and significance of our commitment.

Original article: http://bit.ly/2NH5Zaa

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