PONTON was honoured by the German Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi) for its activities in the blockchain space and in particular for the initiation of the Enerchain project.
Earlier in 2018, the BMWi called for participation in an open innovation initiative for blockchain-based projects and ideas. You can find PONTON’s contribution here: https://www.oip.netze-neu-nutzen.de/ideas/show/820.
In total 76 participants from various sectors registered their projects on the open innovation platform. On May 28, six selected finalists were invited to the BMWi in Berlin to present their projects to a jury of blockchain and digitisation experts (https://www.krypto-news24.de/de/2018/06/11/der-schwerpunkt-blockchain-auf-der-oip-pitch-veranstaltung-des-bmwi/).
The jury selected three final winners from different sectors and PONTON was one of them. PONTON was rewarded as the initiator of Enerchain - one of the few blockchain projects in a stage close to production and for its international scope.
Michael Merz was invited to present the Enerchain project to the general public at the stand of the BMWi on CEBIT 2018 and was honoured for exceptional engagement with the Enerchain project on BMWI’s platform “Blockchain – solutions for intelligent networking”. In his presentation, he gave an overview on further blockchain-related projects at PONTON, which focus on various other processes whithin the energy space. One of the more well-known projects is NEW 4.0, which supports the trading of flexibility products in a decentralied form over the blockchain.
Also the support of local producers and consumer who trade small quantities of energy over the blockchain is addresed by a number of individual projects together with utitiles and electricity suppliers. The recently started ETIBLOGG project aims at real-time trading of energy in the microgrid. Finally, Michael presented the Gridchain project, which supports the synchronisation of TSO and DSO processes in situations of congested power grids.
The common technical foundation of these projects is a software framework, called "WRMHL" which has been developed by PONTON since end of 2016. PONTON plans to make the WRMHL technology available later in 2018 for technical partners who intend to support distributed business processes across organsiations.