Power Ledger launches its next generation energy blockchain
Australian energy blockchain pioneer Power Ledger is migrating its Energy Blockchain platform from Ethereum to more energy efficient Solana.
Solana utilizes Proof-of-History (POH) and Proof-of-Stake (POS) consensus mechanisms, unlike the Proof-of-Work (POW) of Ethereum and Bitcoin.
In addition, Solana offers faster speed and higher transaction throughput. The POH as a timing mechanism allows Solana to achieve scalability, enabling short block times of 400ms and fast throughput of more than 50,000 transactions per second all while maintaining censorship resistance.
In essence POH requires a proof of historical events and POS selects validators according to their holdings or stake, while POW requires proof of a specific computational effort which becomes more demanding – and hence more energy intensive – as mining becomes more competitive and the network grows.
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Ethereum itself is transitioning to POS, addressing the technical issues to reach consensus across the network.
The POS consensus is a key to scalability of the blockchain and Power Ledger’s move to a public POS has been envisioned from early on in its development. The Power Ledger technology stack was originally built on a low power POS consortium chain called EcoChain in 2016 before transitioning to a modified fee-less Proof-of-Authority Ethereum consortium chain in 2017.
Dr Jemma Green, Power Ledger executive chairman, says the speed up in performance and throughput of its platform is necessitated as smart meter reading has moved towards shorter, higher resolution and more granular data and trading intervals.
“Our new blockchain platform based on Solana will be tens of thousands of times faster than Ethereum but also energy efficient. As we started this project to allow renewables to be scaled, part of our mission is to be light on our own carbon footprint.”
Solana is expected to support a scale-up of Power Ledger’s existing suite of services, which includes peer-to-peer trading, flexibility services, energy traceability and applications for renewable energy certificates in projects in the US, Europe and Asia in addition to Australia.
The POWR tokens will continue to be used for existing clients and remain on the Ethereum blockchain. Staking on the new blockchain will be available to all of the POWR token holders with expressions of interest also being sought for additional validators.
