Parity Technologies and Energy Web Partner to Launch new Energy Web Consortia Relay Chain

Parity Technologies, a leading Web3 software development company, and Energy Web, the non-profit building operating systems for decarbonized energy grids, announced their plans to launch an Energy Web Consortia Relay Chain connecting Energy Web to the broader Substrate, Polkadot, and Kusama ecosystem. The new Chain will leverage Substrate to enable energy sector enterprises to run sovereign, customizable blockchains of their own or in partnership with other energy market participants.

Parity Technologies has long been at the forefront of Web3 technology development, most recently building the core technology that supports the Polkadot and Kusama ecosystems. Substrate-based blockchains provide enterprises with flexible on-chain governance functionality—a key feature for enterprises building Web3 solutions. Many companies in the Energy Web ecosystem have specific customer data privacy and legal requirements for operation of enterprise-grade solutions. Blockchains under the new Consortia Relay Chain will allow Energy Web market participants to meet their specific governance requirements and experiment with new crypto-economic solutions. In addition, the Consortia Relay Chain will be positioned as the first multi-chain network connected to Polkadot.

The Consortia Relay Chain is the next step in a long-term partnership between the two organizations. The current Energy Web chain is based on an Ethereum Virtual Machine and Proof of Authority consensus mechanism originally developed by Parity Technologies. Launching the Consortia Relay Chain with Parity is the outcome of many years of co-development between the two organizations.

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“We continue to onboard major energy companies to our open-source technology stack to accelerate the energy transition,” said Jesse Morris, CEO of Energy Web Foundation. “But there is a massive amount of innovation happening in other Web3 ecosystems, such as Polkadot and Kusama, and we want to make sure this innovation comes to the energy sector. By working with Parity to bring the Consortia Relay Chain to life, we can give our members access to new innovations like on-chain governance, native interoperability, robust scalability and other features that Substrate and Polkadot enable. Innovations like these will help our community move even faster in our work to create real-world impact on the global energy transition.”

Parity’s Substrate blockchain-building framework is already at the core of some of the largest and fastest growing Web3 ecosystems, including Polkadot, Kusama and over 150 layer-1 chains. “We see this partnership as a great opportunity to help enterprises in the energy sector get hands-on with some of the most advanced decentralized technologies in production—namely customized runtimes and flexible governance mechanisms for all kinds of blockchains, private, public, hybrid or otherwise,” said  Dr. Gavin Wood, founder of Polkadot and Kusama and co-founder of Ethereum

The new Chain will initially be governed by existing members of the Energy Web ecosystem, with the aim to further decentralize governance participants. “Substrate’s on-chain governance functionality is going to make it very easy to further decentralize governance of the Consortia Chain, once it’s off the ground. Imagine if companies and individuals actually contributing to the energy transition—by investing in solar, batteries or using electric vehicles—could be incentivized to do so and were given a specific governance role weighted by their relative contribution. Substrate plus Energy Web governance will enable us to achieve this goal,” said Morris.

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The Consortia Relay Chain infrastructure will be developed as an opt-in solution with and for the current Energy Web ecosystem and require a new token. “The Energy Web Foundation was founded with the vision to create a more resilient and inclusive backbone for energy markets through decentralized software. The new Chain is a logical next step in the development of the initial vision enabling regulated energy market companies and innovators to develop their own sovereign, customized chains while staying interoperable.” said Ewald Hesse, Co-Founder and Foundation Council member of EWF.

“When you operate an Energy market in Australia, Europe, or the US, you want local parties to decide on the governance, not a party from the other part of the world. This new architecture will enable just that while leveraging the benefits of a global open-source technology stack”, said Morris.

To speed integration of the Energy Web stack with Substrate, Parity Technologies also intends to join as a validator of the current Energy Web Chain. A testnet version of the Consortia Relay Chain and an initial set of connected blockchains is targeted for launch in Q2 2022.

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