Over the past couple of years, there has been an internal battle in tech. For power. As in, electricity.
The AI arms race has led to a massive increase in energy demand by tech giants. According to reports, companies have to wait years to gain access to local grids.
With the biggest players set to continue their stranglehold on the market, energy is now fertile ground for disruption — perhaps even via DePIN.
Framework Ventures’ bet is on energy. Michael Anderson told Katherine Ross of Empire that over the past 6 months, energy was a major focus at the firm.
Anderson reasoned that most major narratives in crypto right now are aligned with general consensus — the two most obvious being memecoins and ETFs.
Energy is, on the other hand, fairly non-consensus, and should pair perfectly with DePIN — which has now proven that it can work, according to Anderson.
“But where it hasn’t lived up to the expectations is on the demand side. You know, [DePIN] is basically building a supply and demand network, where you source supply and then there’s demand for whatever resource the network provides. And historically, it seems that the supply side has been accomplished, but the demand side has been lacking,” He said.
In the crypto world, peer-to-peer startups are no strangers to booms and busts. They were not under DePIN’s umbrella.
Powerledger would be the largest — allowing solar panel owners to sell energy they generate back to the grid. POWR reached a market capitalization of $680 million at its all-time highest in 2018, but trades still 80% under that figure.
Powerledger, as well as other similar products that were released at the time, may have been too early.
Framework has recently backed crypto startups in the energy space including Glow — which aims to greenify energy grids by rewarding solar farm builders with USDC and GLW on Ethereum — and Daylight, a project backed by IoTeX which is similarly working on decentralizing green energy via crypto rewards.
“Energy is the most liquid, fragmented and highly demanded ecosystem that could be registered over a blockchain, and is purpose-built for DePIN,” Anderson, said
“DePIN kind of becomes energy — it’s sort of like how DeFi becomes financial services. I think that we’re gonna see that transition become more pronounced next year.”
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