Restart Energy has added Dr Vlad Trifa to its Board of Advisors. The company announced the news in Bucharest, Romania, on December 8, 2017. Restart Energy is a major European energy provider, though it is also a tech builder. It also built what it calls the first market-ready blockchain energy trading platform in the world.
Trifa is a computer scientist, researcher and entrepreneur. He played a key part in defining and building the application layer of the Internet of Things. The company expects that experience to help fine-tune the energy balancing system of Restart Energy Democracy. That matters because the system handles cross-border energy deals.
Trifa co-founded EVRYTHING and led its product development and R&D teams. Since then, the award-winning IoT cloud platform has been adopted by many Fortune 100 companies. Until 2017 he also ran Swisscom Digital Lab, which he had launched himself. It serves as an innovation center for enterprise digitization at the largest Swiss telecom provider. The lab helps companies adopt AI, blockchain and IoT, all of which matter to the RED ecosystem. His latest venture is Ambrosus, where he serves as Chief Product Officer. That company uses blockchain and IoT to trace food from end to end.
Trifa believes IoT and related tools can move energy markets away from monopoly players. Instead, he sees a system that is far more decentralized, regional and efficient.
He said he was very pleased to join the project as an advisor. That is because he strongly backs its vision of a global, decentralized energy marketplace. He also fully trusts the team to deliver on its ambitious roadmap, since its record speaks for itself. Trifa has spent a decade in IoT as an engineer and founder. As a result, he is convinced that RED’s mix of IoT, blockchain, AI and big data could upend an old and inefficient energy market. He called it an honor to be part of the mission.
How RED works
Restart Energy is launching an ICO to fund Restart Energy Democracy, or RED. The company says it is the only blockchain energy solution designed to work within existing laws and regulations. In practice, its main goal is to improve how energy is bought, sold and used. Because it removes middlemen and allows fully peer-to-peer deals, costs can drop sharply.
The platform runs on the MWAT token, short for MegaWatt. Holders then receive real energy, drawn from the transaction fees paid between providers and buyers. As the company adds energy to its markets, the energy available to holders grows too. Within a few years, the ecosystem should have enough users that one MWAT token powers a house for a month. That energy could pay an invoice or be sold on the marketplace for ETH and local fiat.
RED is backed by Restart Group, a European energy provider with $20 million in revenue. The company set out to democratize the sector and break the hold of legacy monopolies. It has grown 400% since 2016. Today it serves 27,000 household and 3,000 corporate clients, while adding more than 2,000 clients a month. Restart Energy is also building a fully decentralized peer-to-peer energy transfer platform. It rests on the company’s own virtual balancing system, which uses AI, big data and IoT.
The ecosystem has three parts: the RED-Platform, RED-Franchise and RED-MWAT tokens. The tokens allow virtual storage of electricity, which is meant to support clean and affordable energy.
