You are currently viewing Coin Report #65: Energy Web Token

Coin Report #65: Energy Web Token

Welcome to the 65th Coin Report. In today’s report, I will be assessing the fundamental and technical strengths and weaknesses of Energy Web Token. This will be comprised of an analysis of a number of significant metrics, an evaluation of the project’s community and development and an overview of its price-history. The report will conclude with a grading out of 10. I hope you enjoy the read!

Introduction

This is the fifth of my subscriber-exclusive Coin Reports, with Energy Web Token winning the October poll. Each month, I will run a poll and publish a Coin Report on the winner either that month or the following month, available only to those of you that are subscribed to my premium content.

Keep your eyes out for the November poll, which will be hitting your inboxes soon.

I hope this report will prove objective where it must be and fair on more subjective matters. For those who’d like to learn a little more about Energy Web Token prior to reading this report, here are some primary links:


Fundamental Analysis

General:

Name: Energy Web Token

Ticker: EWT

Algorithm: N/A (Proof-of-Authority consensus)

Sector: Energy

Exchanges: Kucoin, Liquid, Uniswap, Hotbit and BitMart

Launch Overview

Energy Web was conceptualised in early 2017 by Rocky Mountain Institute and Grid Singularity, with the native Energy Web Token created on the Ethereum Virtual Machine with Proof-of-Authority consensus and 5-second block times. There was no premine, ICO or IEO, with the maximum supply of EWT being 100,000,000.

Of this 100mn EWT, 90mn was created at genesis and allocated as follows:

  • EWF Operating Fund: 10.9m EWT
  • EWF Endowment: 10mn EWT
  • EWF Community Fund: 37.9mn EWT, released linearly over 10 years
  • Founder Tokens: 10mn EWT, with a 24-month lockup
  • Round A Affiliates: 5mn EWT – spread across 10 Affiliates
  • Round B Affiliates: 15.8mn EWT
  • Round C Affiliates: 335k EWT

The remaining 10mn EWT are allocated to Validator Rewards with logarithmic release over 10 years.

The Energy Web Chain (EW Chain) was publicly launched in June 2019.

Price-History Overview

Energy Web Token has only been trading publicly for around 6 months at this point, and so there is not a great deal of price-history available for EWT. That said, of what is available, I will cover at length in the Technical Analysis section. For now, it will suffice to say that EWT formed its all-time low at April 2020 at 7.634 satoshis (or $0.53), forming its all-time high later in August 2020 at 117,581 satoshis (or $13.65).

Project Overview

Energy Web is focused on the transformation of the energy sector towards a more environmentally-friendly, efficient and decentralised system.

As stated in their whitepaper:

Energy Web Foundation’s overarching objective is to accelerate the global transition to a decentralized, democratized, decarbonized, and digitalized energy system. We do this by unleashing blockchain’s potential across the energy sector. To be certain, blockchain technology is not a singular solution; it is one of many tools that will influence the evolution of energy systems. However, we believe blockchain has the potential to play a critical role in transforming energy markets.

To achieve our vision of widespread adoption of mass-market blockchain applications that support a decentralized, democratized, and decarbonized energy system, we are following several principles:

1. Focus on proving the value in one sector—energy

2. Form interdisciplinary teams of experts

3. Build a collaborative ecosystem with representatives from across the sector

4. Build software and tools to accelerate commercial applications

5. Use innovative governance to balance the benefits of decentralization with regulatory oversight

6. Provide open-source, publicly-available foundational technology that solves common developer needs.

I look forward to measuring Energy Web’s progress in this respect.

Let’s begin with some Metric Analysis:


Metric Analysis:

Below are listed a number of important metrics, all of which are accurate as of 25th October 2020. For anyone reading this who has yet to read a Coin Report, it might be worth reading this section of the first report, where any potentially unfamiliar terms are explained. For any terms or metrics specific to this post, I will provide explanations besides the figures.

Metrics:

General:

Price: $6.52 (50,130 satoshis)

Circulating Supply: 30,928,834 EWT

Total Supply: 59,635,362 EWT

Maximum Supply: 100,000,000 EWT

% of Max. Supply Minted: 59.64%

Network Value: $201.684mn (15,504 BTC)

Network Value at Max. Supply: $642.091mn

Exchange Volume: $466,007 ($433,446 excluding wash)

Exchange Volume-to-Network Value: 0.23% (0.21% excluding wash)

Category: Midcap

Average Price (30-Day): $7.29

Average Exchange Volume (30-Day): $1,204,795

Average Network Value (30-Day): $219.239mn

Average Exchange Volume (30-Day)-to-Network Value: 0.55%

Volatility* (30-Day): -0.0425

Average Daily On-Chain Transactions (30-Day): N/A

Average Daily Transactional Value** (30-Day): N/A

NVT*** (30-Day): N/A

% Price Change USD (30-Day): -20.9%

% Price Change USD (1-Year): N/A

USD All-Time High: $13.65

% From USD All-Time High: -52.1%

Premine % of Max. Supply: N/A

Premine Location: N/A

Liquidity (calculated as the sum of BTC in the buy-side with 10% of current price across all exchanges): 7.87 BTC

Liquidity-to-Network Value %: 0.05%

Supply Available on Exchanges: 75,139 EWT

% of Circulating Supply Available on Exchanges: 0.24%

*Volatility is calculated by taking the average price over the given time-period, calculating the difference between it and the highest price and it and the lowest price over that same time-period, and multiplying those figures together. The closer to 0, the less volatility during that period, and vice-versa. Read this for more on volatility.

 

Supply Emission & Inflation:

Block Reward Schedule: 90mn EWT created at genesis, with a further 10mn allocated for emission over 10 years as miner and validator rewards. Currently 0.9 EWT per block (0.6 emission reward from Community Fund and 0.3 miner (validator) reward from Validator Fund), with 5-second block times, with a logarithmic emission curve.

Average Block Time: 5 seconds

Current Block Height: 8,462,225 

Annual Supply Emission: 5,676,480 EWT (2,845 BTC at current prices) (maximum possible emission)

Annual Inflation Rate18.35%

Circulating Supply in 365 Days: 36,605,314 EWT (not including token unlocks)

Distribution:

Address Count: 18,733

Supply Held By Top 10 Addresses: 18.38%

Supply Held By Top 20 Addresses: 26.2%

Supply Held By Top 100 Addresses: 41.88%*

Inactive Address Count in Top 20 (30 Days of No Activity): 16*

*Excluding team addresses and likely exchange addresses.

 

Analysis:

Well, there’s plenty to unpack here, but unfortunately I was unable to find any transaction-related metrics. As such I will begin by looking at the remaining General metrics.

I’d like to first highlight Energy Web Token’s 30-day Volatility of -0.0425. This places it in the bottom fifth of the previous reports, suggesting that, at least against the dollar, EWT may well be in an accumulation range. We will dive deeper into this in the Technical Analysis section.

Some of the most significant metrics to evaluate for speculators are those related to buy-side and sell-side Liquidity. I found Energy Web Token to have buy-side Liquidity of 7.87 BTC within 10% of spot price across all listed exchanges, equating to 0.05% of its Network Value. This is incredibly low and very unattractive, placing it joint 2nd-lowest among figures previously recorded in these reports. However, we must also consider that the bulk of liquidity appears to exist on the Uniswap contract for EWTB (the bridged ERC-20 version of Energy Web Token), with $425k of liquidity available. Nonetheless, the CEX liquidity is very poor and this may well be a symptom of so few top tier exchange listings.

Concerning sell-side Liquidity, Energy Web Token was found to have 75,139 EWT available for purchase in the orderbooks across all listed exchanges, equating to 0.24% of its Circulating Supply; again the 2nd-lowest figure amongst previous reports, Overall, there is clearly just very little speculative interest in EWT on centralised exchanges, with very few sellers at any price coupled with low demand at current prices.

Now, let’s take a look at the volume-related metrics:

Energy Web Token was reported to have traded $466,007 of Exchange Volume in the past 24 hours, equating to 0.23% of its Network Value. However, a little of this volume appears to be wash-trading. If we look at the activity on exchanges, a more accurate figure for 24-hour volume is $433,446, equating to 0.21% of network value. This, once again, is very poor from a speculator’s perspective. More importantly, its Average Daily Volume for the past month was $1.2mn, equating to 0.55% of its Average Network Value for the same period. This places it in the bottom-fifth among prior reports and confirms our earlier ideas that there simply isn’t much speculative interest in EWT at present.

Moving onto Supply Emission, based on the current block rewards of 0.9 EWT per block and 5-second block times (with a logarithmic curve of emission) I calculated that a maximum of 5,676,480 EWT will be minted over the next year (2,845 BTC-worth at current prices). This gives Energy Web Token a modest maximum annual inflation rate of 18.35% (decreasing annually). That said, this is not accounting for token unlocks, which may join circulation over that time.

More significant is the relationship between this Supply Emission and the Volume metrics mentioned above:

Given that 5.676mn EWT are expected to be minted (at the most) over the next year, we can work out that the average daily supply emission is 87,330, or 7.79 BTC-worth at current prices. This equates to $101,414 of daily supply emission. As Energy Web Token traded ~$433k of volume over the past 24 hours, and an average of $1.2mn of volume daily for the past month, we find that EWT’s average daily supply emission is covered 4.27x by its 24-hour volume and 11.88x by its Average Exchange VolumeFurther, Liquidity of 7.87 BTC barely covers the average daily supply emission.

In short, I would expect there to have to be significant improvements in liquidity and real volume being traded to sustain current prices over the next year.

Finally, let’s take a look at Distribution:

I was impressed – given the relative newness of the EWT token – to find that there are 18,733 holders of EWT.  It is the 11th-highest address count of all coins previously reported on.

With regards to concentration of supply, the top 10 addresses control 18.38% of the total supply; the top 20 control 26.2%; and the top 100 control 41.88%. This is, however, excluding team addresses, smart contracts and a likely exchange address at #5 that controls 1.5mn EWT. The top three addresses are all smart contracts with team and community funds, controlling 28.7mn EWT. I have instead included the subsequent individually-owned addresses in the figures. If we do include those above addresses, the top 10 then control 65.39% of the total supply; the top 20 control 74.2% and the top 100 control 92.3%.

Within the top 20 individual addresses, 16 were inactive over the past 30 days, with 3 addresses adding to their balances and 1 distributing. Net inflows into the top 20 addresses were 729,911 EWT over that period, equating to 1.22% of the total supply.

And that concludes this section on Metric Analysis. Onto the Energy Web Community:


Community:

There are two primary aspects of community analysis: social media presence and Bitcointalk threads. I’ll begin with the former before moving on to the latter.

Social Media:

Concerning social media presence, there are four main platforms to examine: Twitter, Facebook, Telegram and Discord.

Energy Web Token is present on all platforms except Discord. To begin, let’s look at the various social metrics that I calculated from the Energy Web Twitter and Facebook accounts:

Twitter Followers: 12,569

Tweets: 2,165

Average Twitter Engagement: 1.97%

Facebook Likes: 655

Facebook Posts (30-Day): 0

Average Facebook Engagement: N/A

As usual, I will be using RivalIQ‘s social benchmark report for evaluation purposes.

Twitter:

Whilst the Energy Web Token Twitter account does have a moderately large audience of 12,569, its engagement rate is far more impressive at 1.97%.

in RivalIQ’s report, we find that the average Twitter engagement rate across all industries is 0.045%, which means that Energy Web’s engagement rate is currently 43.7x greater. Further, the average engagement rate for the Tech and Software industry is 0.027%, thus Energy Web’s is 73x greater. Relative to other coins, it is the 11th-highest. Great work.

Facebook:

Now, with regards to Facebook, Energy Web has a much smaller audience of 655 Likes, but unfortunately the page has been neglected, with 0 posts in the past 30 days. This is a shame given the great engagement found on Twitter, as it is highly likely that the team would find success in the growth of the community via Facebook were they to employ similar commitment to maintaining this platform.

Discord:

There is no Discord available for Energy Web Token.

Telegram:

The Energy Web Token Telegram group has 4,957 members.

I have provided my key takeaways below:

  • The Telegram group is clearly the community hub, with near-constant daily discussion. There are hundreds of messages posted here on a daily basis.
  • Detailed articles and blog posts on the development of Energy Web and related information are posted to the group, keeping the community well-informed.
  • Admins provide assistance promptly and community questions are answered in detail.
  • The recent partnership with Codra R3 will allow for near-real-time settlement of energy transactions, also allowing for the development of renewable energy communities.
  • The EWT utility token will power the EW Chain and thus EW-DOS, with EWT used for transaction payments (gas on EW Chain and services like Bridges and Oracles) and Bundled Utility Layer service payments.
  • The community are a little concerned at the lack of exchange listings for EWT.
  • There are at least 27 permissioned validator nodes on EW Chain.
  • Overall, the community seem very excited about the long-term prospects of Energy Web.

BitcoinTalk:

There is no active BitcoinTalk thread for Energy Web.

And that concludes my evaluation of the Energy Web community. Let’s now take a look at development:


Development:

For the following Development analysis, I will be evaluating project leadership, the website, the roadmap, the whitepaper, the wallets and finally providing a general overview:

Project Leadership:

There are 31 employees on LinkedIn, with 24 employees listed on the website, as well as 7 listed as part of the Foundation Council.

More specifically, the core team comprises:

The Foundation Council is comprised of:

Energy Web was founded by Rocky Mountain Institute and Grid Singularity, and they are currently hiring a Back End Developer.

Website:

The website can be found here.

The website itself is well-designed and highly informative, with a clear, comprehensive navigation menu, detailed pages and relevant resources made accessible.

If we begin on the homepage, here we find a (quite frankly, unnecessarily) large header image with decent branding, though nothing overtly recognisable. The tagline reads, Any Energy Asset, Any Energy Market, Any Energy Customer – succinctly capturing the mission of Energy Web to decentralise and digitalise the global energy market. Below this, we find a brief overview that highlights the low-carbon, consumer-first system that Energy Web are expecting to facilitate, with the Energy Web Decentralised Operation System (EW-DOS) at the core of this. We are also told that Energy Web currently have over 100 global affiliates from within the energy sector. A list of these partners is found below, including big names like Siemens, Tenaska, E.ON and Centrica. Subsequently, we find the website footer, with social platforms linked (just as in the navigation menu), along with a contact form.

Turning back to the navigation menu, here we find a series of informational pages, some of which will be (or have been) covered elsewhere. For the purposes of this section, I’d like to focus on the Solutions pages.

The three solutions highlighted here are Renewable Energy Markets, Demand Flexibility and Electric Vehicles.

  • Renewable Energy Markets: In 2019, 75% of new generating capacity was renewable, but Energy Web are aware that there is significant room for improvement in the renewable energy markets, particularly concerning renewable energy certificates. By digitalising proof-of-impact, demand can be generated from corporations, SMEs, electric vehicle fleets and decentralised blockchain networks for renewable energy investments. EW Origin – an Energy Web SDK – will allow for new solutions to be built for corporate renewable energy procurement, 100% certified electric vehicle charge guarantees and low-carbon fuel sourcing. Moreover, the EW Zero app will allow buyers to find options from a digital marketplace within one cohesive digital interface.
  • Demand Flexibility: By 2030, there is expected to be a tenfold increase in customer investment into distributed energy sources to over $2trn. This excludes global smart meter deployment. Grid operators need to scale the processes for asset registration, pre-qualification, dispatch and settlement for millions of DERs, and EW Flex will aid these operators in accessing the pool of customer-owned assets, whilst also allowing for customers to improve the economics of DER ownership by growing participation in wholesale energy markets.
  • Electric Vehicles: By 2030, electric vehicle energy demand globally is expected to be equal to Germany or Japan’s total electric consumption. The existence of potentially hundreds of millions of electric vehicles means that there will be significant demand for renewable energy markets, providing opportunities for grid management. EW Origin and EW Flex SDKs will allow for the creation of digital solutions for vehicle identities, green EV charging, grid flexibility and financial settlement.

I also like that Energy Web maintain a regularly updated and detailed blog (on Medium). This is great for keeping their community up-to-date with developments.

Overall, the website is highly informative and well-organised.

Roadmap:

There is no traditional roadmap available for Energy Web; however, I was able to find a roadmap native to the whitepaper and an article referring to goals for the Energy Web Foundation published in December 2019.

Beginning with the whitepaper roadmap (as this was published several months prior to the article), here we find that the EWF (Energy Web Foundation) are seeking to make progress in four key areas: Ecosystem; SDKs; Governance; and Core Technology.

  • Ecosystem: recruiting additional Affiliates; publishing additional documentation, tutorials and developer toolkits; developing and releasing additional open-source software; participating in, sponsoring and hosting design workshops and conferences; educating regulators; publishing position papers in collaboration with industry partners; and inviting regulators to host validator nodes.
  • SDKs: an asset registry to support all applications that require establishing and managing unique asset IDs; physical grid integration and device connection; standard measurement and verification smart contracts; APIs and ABIs that define data structure for communications between on- and off-chain systems.
  • Governance: catalog current and foreseeable attack vectors; design new dynamic defense mechanisms; implement incentives to encourage entities to becomes validators on EW Chain; establish and maintain transparency about the governance approach.
  • Core Technology: here, Energy Web simply mention that features will continue to be built in close collaboration with app developers within both energy and blockchain sectors, with Energy Web funding these features.

Turning to the more recent article, here we find the following:

  • Energy Web, having recruited over 100 Affiliates by December 2019, is now focusing on enhancing energy sector traceability and unlocking grid flexibility from customer-owned resources.
  • This will be facilitated by a transition of the technological approach to the Energy Web Decentralised Operating System (EW-DOS).
  • EW-DOS is a stack of open-source software that includes the EW Chain.
  • Within EW-DOS, we find self-sovereign digital identifiers, decentralized registries, messaging services and legacy IT integrations. This stack allows for transactions to be facilitated between “billions of assets, customers, grid operators, service providers and retailers.”
  • EW-DOS will be decentralised in its nature; available to all parties but “owned by none”.
  • Most importantly, EW-DOS is currently being integrated by Austrian Power Grid AG and PTT in Southeast Asia.

It is a shame that there is no single cohesive roadmap for Energy Web to make both the vision and past & future milestones of the EWF and Energy Web team more readily accessible for the community. It would also be helpful to have clearer, more well-defined goals that the community can refer to; however, the overall direction of Energy Web is strongly favourable within its sector.

Whitepaper:

The whitepaper can be found here and was published in July 2019 as v2.0 of the original whitepaper.

I have provided my key takeaways from the document below:

  • The objective of the EWF is to facilitate the rapid transition of the global energy system to one that is “decentralized, democratized, decarbonized, and digitalized”.
  • Decarbonization will be facilitated in part by community solar, whereby communities can install ground-mounted solar and share in the benefits, with blockchain technology reducing the soft costs of community solar considerably via smart contracts. Blockchains also remove the current geographical constraints of revenue generation via global ownership; further, owners are able to sell the kWh they are entitled to with great ease.
  • Decentralization with be achieved via the re-architecture of the grid from the bottom up, with blockchains enabling grid operators to allow for automated connections of devices and appliances to a decentralized platform that acts on behalf of the owners. For example, electricity usage will be able to be automated for certain times via price signals – one’s home could be in ‘economy mode’ with a potential to be paid for this also. Blockchain grid systems would have digital identities for each distributed energy resource that can then be utilised by smart contracts.
  • Digitalization will be facilitated again by digital identities that make renewable energy purchasing more transparent, efficient and cheaper.
  • Beyond this, the EWF wants to assist in using blockchain technologies for expanded market access, greater contract and market diversity, direct ownership, improved traceability, asset agency, and data sovereignty and democratisation.
  • The EWF are exclusively focused on proving blockchain’s value within the energy sector.
  • The ecosystem of EWF Affiliates is currently comprised of more than 100 organisations from the energy sector and from within blockchain. These include: E.ON, 3Degrees, Acciona, AES, Centrica, Eneco, Engie, gridX, Shell, Siemens, TEPCO, Total and PG&E.
  • Currently, the EW Chain is governed by over 20 validators, with validator nodes being permissioned.
  • EW Chain is built on the Ethereum Virtual Machine in order to be open-source, public, robust, familiar to developers and flexible. Changes have been made to the Ethereum network on EW Chain including replacing Proof-of-Work with Proof-of-Authority consensus in order to increase network capacity by 30x. There are also permissioned validator nodes whilst the chain remains public, along with private transactions.
  • In order to host a validator node, the host must be an EWF Affiliate, who are all registered global energy sector organizations.
  • EWT is the native token to the Energy Web ecosystem and will be used for security on the network and to compensate validators. There are a maximum of 100,000,000 EWT, with 10,000,000 EWT allocated to validators over a 10-year emission curve and 37,900,000 EWT allocated to the Community Fund to be released in the same manner.

More recently, following the announcement of the Energy Web Decentralised Operating System (EW-DOS), the team released this whitepaper. I have summarised a few key points from it below:

  • By 2030, renewables and distributed energy resources will represent two-third of global installed energy generation capacity.
  • Energy Web expect grid operators to build and operate digital systems for secure and reliable operations in the future, much like the physical infrastructure of today.
  • The EW-DOS will facilitate the connection of customers, assets and legacy energy-sector IT systems. This open stack of technologies will be completely public and will be able to be applied in any regulatory context or within any specific market framework.
  • EW-DOS will allow for both organisations and individuals to write an application and deploy it at “enterprise scale” with no requirement for infrastructure of their own.
  • EW-DOS has been implemented with Austrian Power Grid, PTT, PJM EIS, sonnen and Share&Charge all over the world.

Wallets:

The native Energy Web Token (EWT) can be stored on the official web wallet or via MyCrypto or Metamask, or stored on hardware wallets like Ledger and Trezor. There is also a bridged ERC-20 token (EWTB) that can be stored on all ERC-compatible wallets.

And that concludes my fundamental analysis of Energy Web Token.


Technical Analysis

EWT/BTC

EWTBTCDaily

EWT/USD

EWTUSDDaily

As we can see from the charts provided above, Energy Web Token only has ~6 months of price data available. That said, there is one distinct bull cycle that has played out during that time.

If we look at EWT/BTC, we can see that price began early trading by ranging between the all-time low at 7,634 satoshis (which remains the all-time low to this day) and range resistance at 16,965 satoshis. This resistance was soon flipped as support as we moved into May and thus began Energy Web’s cycle, with price rallying to new all-time highs on a near-daily basis until – at the end of May – it found resistance at 75.6k satoshis. We then see a dip back towards 40,000 satoshis, where new support is found, followed by another leg higher into 85.7k satoshis in mid-June. At this point, Energy Web begins another period of consolidation, forming range support at 58.3k satoshis and holding above it for several weeks, before a final breakout begins in August, sending price to the current all-time high of 117,581 satoshis. Since that early August high, we have seen a mechanical slow bleed, with price breaking back below areas of prior resistance and support, ultimately closing below the 200dMA a few days ago and retesting the 58.3k-satoshi support as resistance.

If I’m honest, I see nothing interesting here for a buyer yet, as there are no signs of a bottom having formed, nor of capitulation. If I was looking to buy, I think ~30k satoshis would be where it begins to look more interesting, but I’d like to see a range similar to the one from April form before entering a position.

And that concludes my evaluation of Energy Web.


Conclusion

This report is now approaching 5,000 words, and it is time to draw it to a close.

My final grading for Energy Web is 7 out of 10.*

*On a development level alone, the project is worthy of a 9 – they have made vast strides already in a huge global sector and the team and Foundation seem fully capable of making greater strides towards their primary mission. That said, based on my grading framework, I cannot give the project higher than a 7 due to the issues highlighted in other sections of the report.

Here, you can find my grading framework, for reference.

Lastly, here is a link to a Google Sheets file with any significant data from previous reports compiled for cross-comparative purposes. I will keep this updated as I continue to write these reports.

I hope this report has proved insightful and that you’ve enjoyed the read! Please do feel free to leave any questions in the Comments, and I’ll answer them as best I can.


 

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This Post Has 4 Comments

  1. R R

    As a new sub I must say, wow. This alone feels worth it. We get these weekly? I appreciate the academic approach and links to resources/references. Humbled myself and bought your book too lol. Enjoying it as well. Thanks.

    1. Nik

      Glad you’re enjoying the material! The exclusive reports are once monthly and Market Outlook posts are once a week!

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