Investing in Blockchain interoperability with Polkadot
Exponential change and “disruption” is all around us. As new technologies advance and global trends like decentralisation, democratisation and digitisation take hold, the infrastructure of the energy system is set for a complete transformation. At innogy Innovation Hub, we envision a future energy system that’s driven by autonomous, connected devices and all sorts of local microgrids consisting of decentralised energy producers.
In this Internet of Energy, the ownership of electrons and kilowatt hours will be transferred from one actor to another, from machines to humans to the grid. The energy transition will converge with other mega-trends, such as the transition of Internet of Things (IoT) and the transition of trust. It is expected that there will be over 50 billion connected devices by 2020, and that by 2025 30% of accounting, procurement and settlement will be done by blockchain and AI.
As investors and visionaries, we see it critical that we not only invest in the most obvious building blocks of the energy transition, but also the underlying transactional infrastructure. Blockchain — the new serverless/trustless protocol for converging sectors and Industry 4.0 — is a cornerstone of our machine economy investment strategy.
That’s why we are excited to introduce our latest addition to the Innovation Hub portfolio:Polkadot, a heterogeneous multichain framework that enables blockchains to work together under the protection of shared security. Polkadot is built to connect private and consortium chains, public and permissionless networks, oracles and future technologies that are yet to be created. The Polkadot ecosystem is expected to hold sever hundred blockchains within its first two years.
Polkadot is the first project by Web3 Foundation, a Swiss Foundation founded to facilitate a fully functional and user-friendly decentralised web. Web3 Foundation has completed its private sale of Polkadot tokens to fund the latter‘s development, valuing the project at $1.2 billion. Besides the innovation Hub, investors included Placeholder, Longhash Incubator and ChainX. Representing the deal team from the Innovation Hub’s side were CEO Jan Lozek, Head of ‘Machine Economy’ Kerstin Eichmann, Technology DirectorTorsten Dahmen and our Investment Directors Florian Till and Christopher Natter.
We think the energy system of the future will be inclusive, as it will need to interact with a growing number of third-party environments, stakeholders from different sectors and domain specific chains like the Energy Web Chain in a secure, reliable and fully automated way — with a vast number of transactions to be processed in parallel. Polkadot enables the bilateral value and data transfer between different blockchains and non-blockchain modules. As such, it serves not only as a catalyst to the energy transition but also a means by which we can reduce our energy consumption.
With the new funding, Polkadot will be able to further develop its technology and use cases, while bridging the gap between the corporate world and the start-up ecosystem.
“We believe Polkadot is well positioned to become the backbone technology that will enable the integration of billions of IoT-devices, supporting thousands of market players and providing scalable infrastructure for multiple blockchains. From an investor perspective, it won’t just be a game-changer for the energy industry, but for many other industries too.”
Kerstin Eichmann, Head of ‘Machine Economy’ at innogy Innovation Hub
“As we approach Polkadot’s launch, we are happy to see forward-thinking enterprises like innogy take the next step towards Web 3.0 with us. Polkadot is the first network that has been architected to allow private enterprise networks to interact with public blockchains, opening up an entirely new design space for growth. innogy’s contribution to this ecosystem is a significant vote of confidence in the vision we have laid out for Polkadot.”
Dr. Gavin Wood, Co-founder and former CTO of Ethereum, Co-Founder of Parity Technologies and the Web3 Foundation, Author of the Polkadot paper
We look forward to becoming an active part within the Polkadot network as a validator, supporting the network and in turn, the underlying token economics of the machine economy.
