Blockchain has a vital part to play in the transition to renewable energy, according to decentralized trading platform D.Energy.
Speaking on Rug Radio’s FOMO Hour, the firm’s CEO Shafi Rafi said that the firm’s guiding principle is “making clean energy the new currency of the digital world.”
D.Energy’s layer-1 blockchain ecosystem is powered by a unique “Proof of Energy” consensus mechanism, in which validators purchase and stake tokenized renewable energy certificates (RECs), each of which represents an amount of energy generated from renewable sources.
That makes D.Energy “the first L1 that’s powered by not the native token, but by an NFT in the form of a real world asset,” Rafi said. The blockchain automatically offsets its energy consumption at a ratio of 1000:1 through redeeming RECs, ensuring that it supports renewable generation.
This “inverted mining” process offsets the network’s energy consumption, Rafi said. “Every time our network uses one megawatt hour of energy, we offset 1,000 megawatt hours of energy,” he explained, adding that the resulting “regenerative system” is “not just Net Zero—we’re actually adding clean energy into the environment.”
The aim is to “democratize energy,” he said, creating a borderless, peer-to-peer “energy-backed economy” in which wallets can trade and stake renewable energy using the network’s WATT token, which launches with a token generation event and public sale in the near future.
The current “archaic, outdated” energy market has geographical restrictions, Rafi explained. “In the U.S., only U.S. companies buy renewable energy certificates; in the UK, only UK companies will buy the locally produced ones.” In D.Energy’s borderless ecosystem, “somebody sat in Dubai can buy U.S. certificates,” he said, adding that, “they can stake it or they can buy it for speculation.”
Unlike many blockchain projects, D.Energy has a definite use case in mind from the outset, Rafi said. “Most blockchain layer-1s, they build the code, and the metrics that they compare themselves on are TPS or scalability. Once they deploy and launch, they start to look for use cases and utilities.”
By contrast, D.Energy has a “natively built-in use case,” enabling wallets to natively make peer-to-peer trades of renewable energy, Rafi said. But the project has grander ambitions—not just making blockchain itself sustainable, but incentivizing other industries towards clean energy generation, by offering “convenient, one-click power offsetting to the general public and corporations.”
Other blockchains, too, will be able to access D.Energy’s offsetting system, while Rafi envisions an ecosystem of decentralized applications (dapps) built atop the D.Energy chain itself, creating a non-extractive system that benefits the environment.
“The whole concept is to make the foundation layer of our blockchain renewable energy,” he said, adding that, “the way the world’s headed, everything’s being electrified—so the foundation of value in a digital world should be clean energy.”
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