Spanish renewable energy firm ACCIONA Energia has inked a deal with IKEA to supply electric vehicle (EV) charging points for IKEA’s Spanish shopping centers. The renewable origin of the energy is traced using ACCIONA’s GREENCHAIN blockchain. By the end of 2023, ACCIONA plans to install 475 stations, eventually reaching 567 slots. Around 30% of the stations are reserved for IKEA suppliers and its fleet. Vehicle batteries can also store excess electricity, so the charging points are bidirectional. In other words, they can be used to top up the car’s charge, or the battery can provide energy to the charging station or even the grid.…
Author: Tokenized Toast Club
Austria’s GreenRock Energy is issuing a tokenized green bond to raise €25 million ($27m), with the funds to be invested in solar panel businesses and installations. It says the issuance of the tokens on the public Polygon blockchain is ‘approved’ by three regulators, Germany’s BaFin, Austria’s FMA and Italy’s CONSOB. On the one hand, the issuance demonstrates the potential for small firms to tap the capital markets targeting consumers with low barriers to entry. There is a pressing need to empower SMEs to raise funds more easily. The lower issuance cost for the SME and the fractionalization enabled by tokenization make it more accessible for retail…
Yesterday Blockchain for Energy (B4E) announced the launch of its logistics solution. The oil and gas extraction consortium has 13 members. Since it launched its own blockchain network in February, Saudi Aramco and EQT have joined. Other members include Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Repsol. The new logistics offering – the Commodity Transport Web3 Field Automation solution – automates much of the transport process, reducing manual validation, slow communication and discrepancies. Hence, deliveries are validated using the consortium blockchain and the data is available for viewing immediately. It’s flexible enough to support various types of commodities and requirements in different regions. “The solution will be…
Blockchain sustainability startup Circularise has partnered with transport and marine biofuel firm FincoEnergies on a project involving its GoodFuels brand. GoodFuels will use Circularise software for biofuels supply chain traceability. Circularise has a long list of blue chip clients including Asahi Kasei, Covestro, Domo Chemicals, Marubeni, Mitsubishi Chemicals, Neste, Philips Domestic Appliances and Porsche. The European Union’s RED II regulations for biofuels require quite a bit of record keeping. For example, GoodFuels has to keep records of the sourcing, chain of custody and greenhouse gas emissions (GHG). Most of this is manual, so Circularise helps to make it digital and also integrates with third party verification schemes. ISCC EU is a…
Électricité de France (EDF) completed a proof of concept (PoC) using the public Hedera DLT to automate renewable energy certificates (RECs). Many electric vehicle (EV) drivers want to ensure the power used to recharge their cars is renewable. They can buy RECs and then redeem the RECs at the EV charging station. The automated redemption of tokenized RECs was trialed at EDF’s MASERA Microgrid demonstrator in Singapore. In addition to redeeming the RECs, the PoC also collected data from solar panels, generators, and energy storage systems to measure the rate of green energy production put into the microgrid. This was then cross checked with the…
Yesterday Berkshire Hathaway Specialty Insurance (BHSI) announced an expansion of its multinational capabilities including the adoption of a permissioned blockchain solution developed by ChainThat. BHSI can deliver insurance services to 178 countries. BHSI adopted WorldLink to improve the efficiencies of the workflow for its multinational business. Worldlink is now used for 95% of its global insurance and is based on the insurtech ChainThat’s Beyond Multinational Programs platform. ChainThat estimates a potential 30% reduction in costs through efficiencies from its SaaS offering. During the enterprise blockchain boom of 2018, insurance appeared to be one of the most promising business sectors. One of the key…
Yesterday Aon, the world’s second largest insurance broker, announced it completed a pilot with Nayms, the blockchain insurance protocol that went live last year. Nayms is a Bermuda-regulated insurance marketplace that operates on a similar model to Lloyds, as its name suggests. Instead of Lloyds syndicates, Nayms has ‘cells’. This involves locking up crypto or stablecoins with a return of between 11% and 17%. Of course if there’s a claim, some (or all) of the money will be lost. Much in the way Lloyds helps with access to capital, Nayms is targeting the same, but not from retail investors. It also helps…
Schroders Capital recently partnered with reinsurer Hannover Re to tokenize a portfolio of reinsurance contracts on a public blockchain as part of a proof of concept. There is a wide range of insurance linked securities (ILS), but one of the simplest types is catastrophe bonds. Cat bonds are used to offload risks of weather events to a wider range of investors. Otherwise a spate of bad weather events could wipe out the reinsurance sector. Given there’s an emphasis on the tokenization of alternative investments, the ILS sector fits neatly into that category. It is currently a popular investment amongst hedge funds given historically…
Last week blockchain startup Infineo announced it had tokenized $125 million in life insurance policies in just over three months since launch. These are not new policies. They are policies that the insured has uploaded to its platform to tokenize. The current purpose is to ensure the beneficiaries are notified if the policy holder dies. However, Infineo also plans to create a secondary marketplace for policies and support lending using insurance policies as collateral. When someone dies, the beneficiaries aren’t always aware they were included in the policy. In the past there have been issues with life insurers not making sufficient effort…
This is a guest opinion post from Alex Walz, Director of Marketing at self-sovereign identity firm Evernym. It’s a sobering reality, but one we all have to face: Short of an unprecedented miracle, a coronavirus vaccine will not be widely available until mid-to-late 2021, if not later. Most vaccines take years or even decades to hit the market. Without a vaccine, a full return to normalcy is simply not in the cards. At the same time, quarantine and self-isolation cannot continue indefinitely. In the near-term, countries around the world have begun looking toward “immunity passports” as a way of reestablishing some…