Lition opens source code — and focuses on 3 new areas
Lition’s peer-to-peer energy use case was always to bring transparency and power to the people. So far, this is done successfully for many households every day. These customers are able to choose their supplier, and the blockchain gives them unprecedented transparency, as every daily energy trade between a power plant and them is visible. It has also shifted power from the large conglomerates to the consumer, which can now choose which power plant to source their energy from.
We’d now like to take this one step further and even increase transparency by releasing our source code for the energy use case publicly on Github at https://www.github.com/lition-blockchain. It includes our front-end, written primarily in React on Node.js, as well our Smart Contracts developed in Solidity, both released under the creative commons license for non-commercial use.
Why are we doing this?
Lition is a movement to bring blockchain solutions to the mass market. While adoption needs live use cases with business benefits leading the way, it will only happen if companies developing these mainstream solutions trust the available live use cases. And exactly this trust we want to increase by allowing interested users and companies to look ‘under the hood’.
While this might be fundamentally different to the approach large (centralized) corporates would take, we believe this transparency is needed to break with the old-habits. Previously, problems were solved by centralized, closed-source, on-premise solution. The future — to our view — is decentralized and open-sourced. That applies for the energy use case, but also the underlying Lition blockchain infrastructure we’re working on.
What exactly has been released?
Specifically, we released two repositories for the energy use case. A compiled version can be tested at https://demo.lition.de with the login ‘demo’ and password ‘demo1234’.
- Frontend: This contains all source code needed for user interaction. Our toolset our methodologies have previously been described in two medium posts by our development head here, and specifically for blockchain integration here, and they can now be experienced firsthand.
- Smart Contracts: Our smart contracts written in solidity are described here, which cover the main functions to buy and sell energy on the energy exchange, but also register new consumers or producers. These smart contracts can execute on any Ethereum virtual machine, like the Ethereum — or the Lition blockchain infrastructure on public/private sidechains.
What do we develop next?
Our tech team is currently working on three key areas:
- Blockchain Infrastructure. The infrastructure of our energy use case and the solidity smart contracts now released runs on Ethereum, along with all well-known limitations on block confirmation times, transactions costs, privacy and the ability to delete data, which is needed for data privacy laws.While Ethereum is facing these issues, it is still the best system for decentralized computational resources out there and therefore we decided to develop on top of it, as a layer 2 solution. The goal later on is to migrate the smart contracts to a private sidechain of Lition’s infrastructure so that Ethereum’s limitations are being passed by.
- Second use case: While we have demonstrated the benefits of blockchain applications in the Energy space, we are looking forward to bring the Lition Blockchain towards other industries as well. We will have upcoming news about an additional live use case for a reputable client in another sector soon, so stay tuned!
- Asset tokenization through security tokens: Security tokens offer a huge benefit over traditional ways of owning assets, as they overcome many issues. However, many current implementations face data privacy issues and are, depending on jurisdiction, illegal as private data cannot be deleted. This is the benefit of the Lition blockchain solution, and we together with partners are actively working to demonstrate these advantages and thereby pave the way for large-scale adoption.
