Exploring the CyberMiles ecosystem: Where Plasma meets electricity at Eloncityhttps://medium.com/cybermiles/exploring-the-cybermiles-ecosystem-where-plasma-meets-electricity-at-eloncity-c18e85ab8a79The Eloncity project is one of the most ambitious cryptoeconomic projects. It aims to decentralize the electrical grid infrastructure and energy monopolies by replacing them with a hierarchy of blockchain-enabled microgrids. Those microgrids allow communities to store, trade, and consume locally-generated renewable energy. The system aims to achieve supply and demand balance within — and across — communities, reducing the need for very expensive peak generation power and the power transmission fees that plague the network today.
However, households need to trade frequently in order to establish an efficient energy market. As the trading volume grows geometrically with the number of households in the network, the frequency of trading, which we estimate to be millions of transactions per second in a typical country, could exceed the capacity of any blockchain.
Fortunately, most of the energy trading also is limited within microgrids; that is, most trading happens between stable groups of households in the same neighborhood or community. That allows us to scale the network by building side chains, each representing a microgrid.
Eloncity is partnering with CyberMiles to build its infrastructure on the high-performance CyberMiles public blockchain. And like CyberMiles, Eloncity aims to build a highly optimized virtual machine that is specific to its particular application protocol. In this case, CyberMiles and Eloncity are collaborating to develop a customized Plasma implementation that allows for fast, secure energy trading based on the Eloncity protocol. The goal is to automate much of the verification workload and reduce the complexity of cryptoeconomic games.