Ethos Renewable Assets — Why Blockchain?
A typical question that is raised with a lot of projects, companies, and products, is ‘why blockchain?’ This is a fair question, a lot of blockchain projects I have come across don’t need blockchain. One of the classics that sticks in my mind was the Long Island Iced Tea company who in 2017 changed their name to Long Blockchain Corp and released a statement saying it was:
“shifting its primary corporate focus towards the exploration of and investment in opportunities that leverage the benefits of blockchain technology”
You make iced tea! Come on!!?? Regardless of the lunacy, the stock jumped 200%.
On the other side of the coin in the early 2000s we had the introduction of the Cloud, people were worried about data security, high expenses, accessibility, and generally losing control. In the end, none of these fears came true and nowadays we don’t think about whether a company is on the cloud or not, we just get on with utilising their services.
I want to clear up these two points when it comes to Powered by Ethos (Ethos) and our use of blockchain. A lot of education is needed in this space so I am sure this will not be the last time I bring this subject up.
So why is Ethos using the blockchain and NFTs?
Liquidity
Ability to easily use the Secondary Market and decrease ownership transfer time — Transferring rights to financial or physical assets can be time consuming and admin intensive. This normally involves a lot of paperwork, with signing and countersigning, and multi-day settlement periods. By using an NFT as the rights to the underlying assets’ value, simply transferring the NFT to another person’s wallet, also transfers the rights to the value of the underlying asset. In addition, the transactions are done instantly and transparently, as the ledger is updated automatically.
No 3rd Parties
As it is a decentralised system, no intermediary fee is required — As the NFTs can be transferred privately between to people, there is no need for lawyers, brokers or other expensive third parties to be involved.
Auditing
Improves ease of auditing the product — As the blockchain is fully transparent and immutable it is the perfect accounting tool. By using the blockchain to process these transactions, we are creating a fully holistic audit trail that anyone can view.
Anonymity
Although anyone can view the transactions, privacy issues are addressed on the blockchain by anonymizing personal data and using permissions to prevent access. No personal data is held on-chain. There will be KYC and AML checks completed on our customers but none of this is held on-chain or in public view.
Compliance Costs
Reduce compliance costs — NFTs and the blockchain are immutable. There is not a more accurate way of being able to demonstrate a fact, than being able to show the data, the history, and the origination, than can be done on-chain.
Metadata and IoT
Easily record metadata for associated real-world assets — The NFTs are associated with real-world assets like solar panels and wind turbines. These assets collect a lot of data. We will be creating a dashboard in-app that displays this data but we also want to add the data to the NFT so you can see exactly what the real-world assets associated with your NFT are doing. Every time you connect your wallet to the Ethos dApp, the Internet of Things (IoT) data from physical assets will sync with your NFT. This will provide you with an up to date record of the assets’ performance, that can be viewed directly in your wallet.
So as you can see from the above, there are many benefits to Ethos using a blockchain in the underlying technology.
Blockchain delivering ‘Real yield’ to harness the power of climate tech
To my second point mentioned in my opening statement where I referred to the cloud, I want to allay some fears and correct a few clichés. What we are doing at Ethos has nothing to do with altcoins or your typical cryptocurrency business. Yes, we are using the same technology but the technology is not the thing to fear. Many large and reputable companies that you are probably already using are working with blockchain technology, these include:
Barclays Bank
British Airways
DHL
Siemens
Visa
There is nothing evil about this technology, there is nothing unsafe about this technology. Blockchains do not hurt people, people hurt people.