Back in October, Internet Of Energy Network (IOEN), a hybrid blockchain/post-blockchain smart grid energy distribution system collaborated with TrustSwap to complete their $IOEN token offering.
Internet of Energy Network (IOEN) intends to create a secure digital infrastructure for clean, sustainable energy, powered by virtual microgrids. We spoke with Thing Thing from IOEN to find out how they are advancing this mission and what comes next on their product roadmap.
Explain what IOEN does in the simplest terms possible?
The IOEN token funds microgrids and renewable energy projects worldwide. The IOEN organization arranges these deals. The organization also curates, maintains, educates, and promotes an open-source code base so that energy projects can grow organically.
How was the idea for IOEN conceived?
The phrase “Internet of Energy” was first conceived by one of our founders, Simon, who saw that the only way to spread our bottom-up solution at the speed needed to mitigate global warming was to give it away. The concepts have been a career-long focus of another one of our execs Adam, who is an ecologist. We are a true mission-driven team, where we see that the only way forward is an inexpensive, clean energy future.
Explain the utility of $IOEN
When fully vested there will be 1B IOEN tokens, a fixed supply. This leaves the door open for buybacks, but it is important that we see our token has true utility. We are eyeing Tier 1 exchanges in the US market for blockchain, and in California (as you can imagine) is leading the way in microgrids and their regulations.
The original plan was to tie $IOEN directly to kilowatt-hours (kWh) but then we realized a full energy-based economy should reward other participants, like people who maintain solar farms, or cafés that provide discounts for community credit holders. We considered burning and minting, but we want to be a true utility token with the value fixed to usefulness in the network. Burning and minting can decouple this and be manipulated.
As with other projects, we retained some tokens to get the IOEN organization up and running, although we have staked our tokens for six months to demonstrate commitment and provide stability through the first part of the roadmap.
IOEN tokens are used to pre-purchase energy credits for future grids at a 90x reduction in future prices. As shown in our roadmap, the tokens facilitate funding of energy-based projects, with the ability to participate in governance. As the energy economy develops, tokens can be used directly in microgrid-based communities for related services.
Tell us about the team behind IOEN, their credentials, as well as their motivation for this project?
Dr. Adam Bumpus has worked in clean energy innovation and carbon finance for 20 years with the UN, World Bank, and large companies to deliver energy solutions globally. He has a PhD from Oxford in this area and is a regular climate expert on a popular nightly national news program here in Australia. In 2018, he co-founded RedGrid with Simon and Alex, one of Australia’s leading energy software companies.
Simon spent over ten years working with leading Australian banks in both domestic and global capacities. This included a position at the National Australian Bank (NAB), as their joint lead for blockchain technology and strategy. He is the co-founder of the Global Impact Fintech ThinkTank (GIFT) which operates in 68 Countries.
David is our Strategic Lead. He was one of the earliest members of the Holochain team and has worked as Holochain’s strategic director.
Mike is our lead architect. In 2015 he co-hosted the very first blockchain meetup in Melbourne, Australia, and brought our CTO Simon along. He was an advisor to the Asia Pacific blockchain conference in 2018. Later that year he discovered Holochain. He is one of three electrical engineers on the core team; his experience has been mostly on national telecommunications networks, and he has spent the past three years in cyber security.
Thing Thing is our Chief Marketing Officer, she was previously in the smartphone industry and now she’s bringing her expertise into the IOEN team to grow the community.
Connor is leading Operations at IOEN, having previously served as Chief Compliance Officer at US based cryptocurrency exchange ChainRift, as well as providing consultancy services to various blockchain projects.
In Melbourne we have Harri, our genial community manager and we have just hired a few more individuals in other parts of the world!
Our team includes over twenty more people in places like Venezuela, Malaysia, Vancouver Island, Barcelona, and Ukraine. Please click About on ioen.tech to learn more!
Why should investors be excited about IOEN?
IOEN finds itself at the nexus of everything that is happening right now; climate change, renewable energy, cryptocurrency, even NFTs. We have a solid team of individuals who are experts in their respective fields, all complementing the whole team, and a deep support network of like-minded people in finance, energy, and distributed ledger technology. We are not ‘yet another blockchain project’ creating more of the same. Our agent-based architecture is unique and ideally suited for the upcoming world of IoT (Internet of Things) because it mimics nature in resilience and scalability. We are starting with $2.8M in private backing and are attracting more support daily.
What are the challenges this industry is currently facing? How is IOEN solving these challenges?
By ‘this industry’ we interpret this to mean blockchain, but we need to understand IOEN is a hybrid of technologies, where blockchain is the upper layer of our architecture.
Blockchain still suffers from finding valid use cases. DeFi is filling these, but this is not primary to real-world problems. There are now valid blockchain protocols such as Solana and Cardano which are addressing the first and second generations’ issues of scaling and speed, and are becoming green by moving away from proof of work.
IOEN’s architecture allows for alternatives at each level; if the communities believe a protocol is better for their use cases, we’ll add it to our offering.
Where do you see this industry going next?
Blockchain will continue to gain mainstream acceptance, with Mastercard and Visa already promoting crypto. DeFi is still finding its feet; we hope it doesn’t get too derivative like the old world we are trying to leave behind. Buzzwords like “NFTs” and “Metaverse” are mostly hype now but will settle down and offer true value in the years to come.
There is still plenty of growing up to do, but the cool thing is we are all doing it together, in a decentralized way.
What have been some of the most rewarding parts of this journey for you?
That this amazing and amazingly tight team has hit targets over the past three years, and we truly offer something the world needs. Perhaps even more rewarding is seeing this vision ignite in people we haven’t met but want to help. It’s then that we know we are on the right track.
What comes next on IOEN’s product roadmap for the next three to six months?
We have an article on this here.
A picture tells a thousand words- so here is our roadmap:
As you can see it is broken down into three phases:
- Phase One: Establishment
- Phase Two: Bootstrapping the Network
- Phase Three: IOEN Ecosystem Services
At each step, we are considering tech, business development, and growing the community. We are hitting each area hard: we are finding and creating the architecture, we are developing relationships in crypto finance and international finance and in energy industry, worldwide, and we are taking the time to grow a passionate, committed community.
We have a continual set of announcements in the pipeline, with more to come. They include:
- An innovative way to apply NFTs to our microgrids, in both recognition of our earliest projects in Africa and the Subcontinent, and in energy certification;
- Work on community battery and mobile battery projects. Community batteries provide power to groups such as suburbs or schools; mobile batteries are related to EVs. We have announced a partnership with Emergi who are operating in Liberia with electric powered people carriers;
- We are launching the “100 Grids Campaign” and 8 projects have already signed up to participate.
Our Medium channel https://medium.com/@IOEN has over 70 articles and will shortly provide more, including talking about our demo on Picogrids, and what’s coming up in the next six months. Please bookmark this site!
To stay updated on the latest news from IOEN, follow their announcements via their Twitter and Telegram channels.
