We previously wrote about the idea of using an energy backed crypto token.  It is one of those ideas that take the idea of crypto beyond just the ‘virtual’ world and into the ‘real’ world. In addition, the idea of an energy backed crypto is appealing. It provides the advantages of a blockchain – an open, incorruptible ledger, combined with a token that’s backed by something that is useful in the real world – and what’s more useful to our civilization than energy?

Today, we discuss another such project – RED (Restart Energy Democracy).  The RED team is also putting out an energy backed token, called the MWAT token. The company is more interesting though – they have an existing client base of over 3,000 businesses and 25,000 residences, and has an existing business in the EU. This greatly helps when it comes to trying to get others to adopt your ideas and product, since there’s a ready customer base already.

Also, the team is knowledgeable about the industry and therefore presumably have a higher probability of success.

We’ve heard some people trying to compare WePower and RED. We don’t take sides on projects we discuss. However, there’s this misconception that if there is one project in the space, then there’s no need for another one. This is completely false. The energy industry is a multi-trillion dollar industry. Innovation in this industry will drive the next trillions of dollars of value created. There is space for multiple projects.

In fact, the more projects in a niche, the better, since they are bound to take different approaches and methodologies, and after the dust settles, the market determines which approaches worked and which didn’t. We like to see such real world experiments run, especially in the crypto world. This reduces the learning curve for the next projects.

We are, of course, seeing an increasing trend towards crypto projects that combine multiple technology trends. In a similar vein, the RED project combines green energy with crypto.

So about the RED Platform itself, it can be used for a number of purposes. Firstly, the simple buying and selling of electricity in a peer to peer marketplace is enabled. This means if you have solar panels installed on your roof, you can sell this energy to your neighbor – no need to go the grid at all. A small community-driven power project can become feasible all of a sudden.

Also, energy-backed tokens are interesting in that they help finance a green energy project better than regular money. How? By promising to pay back not in USD or EUR but in KWh instead. This is more predictable and isn’t dependent on the market vagaries. This provides a higher incentive for entrepreneurs to start new projects and get them funded.

RED has the MWAT token backed by energy, with a maximum of up to 1 MWh, although it starts at 0.1 KWh.

Interested in participating in their token sale? Make sure you read the whitepaper.

Photo Credit: marian rodriguez

We’ve often said in the past that to understand the true power of crypto, you need to look not just at ‘blockchain technology’ in isolation, but combine it with all the other technology trends that are going on in the world today. In effect, the power of crypto will not be unleashed in isolation, but in a combination of different technologies that will shape the next 100 years of humanity. In that regard, projects working to combine blockchains with other technologies – AI, AR/VR, IoT, autonomous mobility, etc. excite us, since what we need is a lot of experiments run in these areas, so we know which ones work in the real world, which ones fail, and the lessons learned from those failures to build a better system tomorrow.

To that end, we want to introduce our readers to a new crypto project that is aimed at combining two of these powerful future trends – crypto and autonomous vehicles. The project is called DAV – Decentralized Autonomous Vehicles. It is a crypto token for the economy that will be enabled by the future technological progress of the autonomous vehicles. What the DAV Token itself does is to provide access to the DAV Platform. What the DAV Platform does is to allow access to a range of services in the autonomous vehicles space.

The DAV Platform is a platform that lets various autonomous vehicles transact with one another. This will be a crucial feature of the autonomous cars revolution, because it can help automate a lot of the features of decision making traditionally reserved for humans instead of machines, especially when it involves payment.

Using the DAV Platform, for example, you can access a peer to peer market of mobility. The way this works is like any other peer to peer marketplace – one party rents out the resource, an autonomous car in this case, and the other party borrows the same resource. The platform brings both the parties together on one platform to enable the transaction. The payment for this service all happens in the DAV Token.

The DAV Platform is a multi-sided marketplace, however, since there are also service providers in the equation. The service providers help keep the autonomous cars in working condition and good shape, and are paid for their service by the owners.

One nice feature of the whole platform is that it is an open marketplace and not limited to large corporations that are active in the autonomous vehicle space. From the very beginning, the company is building out the platform keeping the person to person market in mind, not just a person borrowing something from a large corporation. This therefore eliminates the need for a middle man during the transaction, which can become a rent-seeking entity with hideous profits at the expense of the people/users/community. Here, the value created by the network is shared within the network, not with the shareholders of a large corporation.

The DAV Platform also solves other issues that the autonomous vehicle industry will need to solve, such as identity and discoverability. These are crucial, since the ‘objects’ are in the real world and not in the virtual world. Identity is a crucial element when fungibility isn’t desirable or required, which is unlike many other digital goods.

Remember that the platform is decentralized, so everything from discovering resources to communication amongst the parties is facilitated in a decentralized manner.

If you like such long term bets, check out DAV’s whitepaper for more information on the project.

Photo Credit: Photo Steel