Grid Singularity: Ethereum's Clean, Green, Energy Blockchain [INTERVIEW]

Years before the launch of Ethereum, a faction of its principal founders banded together with seasoned policy professionals, energy sector executives, and PhD-holders to explore meaningful usage cases for blockchain.

Dr. Ana Trbovich, Co-Founder and COO of this long-lasting alliance, Grid Singularity, explained to CryptoSlate how her decentralized energy project was planning to bring to fruition the widely idealized smart, green, and distributed global energy ecosystem.

For Switzerland-based Grid Singularity, decentralization is the next step for energy.

Just as 2016's whirlwind of early dApp projects began to take hold Grid Singularity decided that no blockchain was yet equipped to deliver their envisaged energy data exchange ecosystem, and that they could be left waiting years for the "Appropriate core technology" to roll along.

It was this technological gridlock, she explained, that gave rise to Grid Singularity's existential mission: to build the very technology it believed companies would need to "Come to commercialization sooner" and use blockchain to revolutionize the energy sector.

Having partnered in 2016 with the Rocky Mountain Institute, a US nonprofit promoting renewable energy and sustainability, Grid Singularity co-founded the Energy Web Foundation in Switzerland and started work on the Energy Web Chain-an open-source blockchain "Specifically designed for the energy sector's regulatory, operational, and market needs."

With core members consisting of Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, Parity Technologies co-founder Jutta Steiner, and a team of similarly talented blockchain developers, Grid Singularity appears to have hit the ground running in its mission to build "The one" dApp platform for energy.

With a live Proof-of-Authority, Parity Client-based test network, Trbovich maintains that the project's mainnet "Open, decentralized energy data exchange platform" will grace the market with a number of commercial applications when it launches in mid-2019.

Whatever impact Trbovich-also a professor at the European Institute of Innovation and Technology-believes the project will have on the market, she seems to think it will be some time before regulators give the green light to the project's "Most exciting" usage case, peer-to-peer energy trading.

A number of governments are dabbling with the regulatory sandboxes that would facilitate the "Radical" shift to peer-to-peer energy markets, Trbovich said.