Blockchain customisation coming for the energy sector

Energy Web is looking to bring more flexibility for blockchain users in a partnership with Web3 software developer Parity Technologies.

The two parties have announced plans to launch the Energy Web Consortia Relay Chain connecting Energy Web with Parity Technologies’ Substrate blockchain-building framework and the broader Polkadot and Kusama parachain ecosystems.

Substrate is an open source framework that enables the creation of specialised blockchains for any use case, which is a key feature for enterprises building solutions for the so-called Web3, such as decentralised apps (dapps) to run on a blockchain.

The new Consortia Relay Chain will leverage Substrate to enable energy sector users to run sovereign, customisable blockchains of their own or in partnership with other energy market participants.

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For example, many companies in the energy sector have specific customer data privacy and legal requirements for the operation of enterprise-grade solutions. Blockchains under the new Chain should allow Energy Web participants to meet their specific governance requirements as well as experiment with new crypto-based solutions.

Jesse Morris, CEO of Energy Web Foundation, says there is a massive amount of innovation happening in Web3 ecosystems, such as Polkadot and Kusama.

“By working with Parity to bring the Consortia Relay Chain to life, we can give our members access to new innovations like on-chain governance, native interoperability, robust scalability and other features that Substrate and Polkadot enable. Innovations like these will help our community move even faster in our work to create real-world impact on the global energy transition.”

Parity Technologies has been at the forefront of Web3 technology development and its Substrate framework is at the core of the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems.

Polkadot and Kusama sharing a similar architecture were developed as a Web3 platform to interconnect multiple blockchains and enable them to exchange information and transactions in a trustless way. Their difference is that Polkadot is designed for enterprise and B2B applications while Kusama is intended as a pre-production test network.

The Consortia Relay Chain infrastructure will be developed as an opt-in solution with and for the current Energy Web ecosystem.

Initially the new Chain will be governed by existing members of the Energy Web ecosystem, with the aim to further decentralise the governance. For example, Substrate’s on-chain governance functionality could be utilised to incentivise investors in distributed energy resources or electric vehicles with a specific governance role weighted by their relative contribution.

It also opens the way for local party governance in individual countries or regions.

To speed integration of the Energy Web stack with Substrate, Parity Technologies intends to join as a validator of the current Energy Web Chain. A test net version of the Consortia Relay Chain and an initial set of connected blockchains are targeted for launch in Q2 2022.