A battle has brewed behind the scenes of tech over the past few years. For power. As in, electricity.
Energy demand from tech giants has skyrocketed due to the AI arms race, to the point that companies are reportedly facing years-long waits to access 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.
That’s what Framework Ventures is betting on. Co-founder Michael Anderson recently told Empire’s Katherine Ross that energy has been a huge focus for the firm over the past six months.
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.
Peer-to-peer energy startups have already had boom and bust cycles in crypto. Although they generally weren’t positioned under the DePIN umbrella.
Powerledger would be the largest — allowing solar panel owners to sell energy they generate back to the grid. POWR hit an all-time high market cap of about $680 million in 2018 but still trades 80% below that mark.
So much has changed for energy markets since then, and it could be that Powerledger and others like it were simply 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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