Homegrown BTC Markets exchange adds homegrown Power Ledger

Power to the people via BTC Markets!

BTC Markets is one of Australia's relatively few homegrown cryptocurrency exchanges, and it has now listed Power Ledger (POWR), one of Australia's relatively few homegrown cryptocurrencies, as its eighth token.

It seems to have landed with an impact, with the listing making its market on the global markets, and for a while, leaving POWR as the only cryptocurrency making gains against a bearish headwind.

"At BTC Markets, our mission is to support the growth of innovative Australian projects, connecting them to Australian investors who understand the transformative potential of blockchain technology," said BTC Markets co-founder Jarrod Crane.

Power Ledger saw early international success with its ICO being the largest in Australia at the time, bolstered largely by overseas investments. It's also one of relatively few cryptocurrencies to appreciate beyond its ICO price and continue growing. It's quickly pushing towards real-world adoption, with ongoing trials in Fremantle and Osaka.

"Power Ledger brings exciting technology to the energy market, as one of the few platforms to offer peer-to-peer renewable energy trading," Crane says.

"We're thrilled to be the first Australian ERC20 token to be added to BTC Markets," said David Martin, co-founder and managing director of Power Ledger. "With the extensive BTC Markets user base, this listing is a huge step towards our goal of democratising power, and will allow platform users and Application Hosts to easily acquire POWR for use within our platforms."

How Power Ledger works

In short, Power Ledger is a system for distributed energy trading. The idea is for people to be able to generate energy at home, with rooftop solar panels and similar, and to then be able to trade that energy peer to peer.

This opens up a lot of new possibilities. It might be a more tempting option than Australia's "derisory" feed-in tariffs, and as Martin said can also allow for the "democratising" of power.

For example, all the residents of a building might chip in for rooftop solar and then share the energy among them or might arrange to sell off excess power being generated by rooftop solar when there's no one around to use it, or might let people more easily rent out their home electric vehicle charging stations to compensate for Australia's still-sparse charging infrastructure.

The nuts and bolts of the system are two separate blockchain layers.

• POWR. This might be thought of as the big outer layer for the entire global Power Ledger system as a whole. POWR is the native token, and the one being listed on BTC Markets and other exchanges.
• Sparkz. The Sparkz layer might be thought of as individual energy marketplaces for different areas. One market might be a single household selling energy back to the wider market, and another might be a large established energy company selling to the same market. By making all these options available, the market is opened and democratised.

Over time, the goal is to invest in the creation of more community-owned decentralised renewable energy sources and to create an entirely new market paradigm beyond the old fashioned top-down system controlled by a handful of largely self-interested energy companies.

Power to the people?

How Power Ledger works in more detail

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author holds ETH, IOTA, ICX, VET, XLM, BTC and ADA.

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