So how does releasing a crypto help further this project. Does the project hold a certain amount of crypto and as the value goes up they can use this money to further the project or is at as results of users on the blockchain or some other technology. Also, what causes the value of the crypto to go up is it something this project does or is it supply versus demand of the buyers and seller of the crypto. I'm not disagreeing with you as I am new and I am trying to understand.
If you think of green assets - solar panels, electric vehivles, smart meters, charging stations. It's too distributed for energy corps to effectively manage / profit from. Also some of those assets are owned by consumers. So Energy Web runs an (EVM - Ethereum Virtual Machine) compatible chain. It runs on proof of authority so that it's fast enough for IoT devices etc. It's actually operated by huge corps validators.energyweb.org. Anyway so it's basically a faster ETH with some tweaks. First there's purpose built energy services built into the chain called EW-DOS which lets corporates do things like sell green certificates, provide grid flexibility, peer to peer trading etc... anyway that's the high level concept.
You asked about what will drive the price... scarcity. EWT is needed for gas and to pay for all services. Theres a validator layer and a utility layer. The validator layer is run by "validator nodes" energy companies that need the token for services. The utility layer is run by "urility nodes" that offer services like decentralized IDs, messaging service, file storage etc..
On the validator side the node operators need the token for utility. So the token's they mint have incentive to be spent not dumped on exchange. And the services they buy (from utility layer) have to be done a year in advance using an escrow model. So say I have a wind turbine that I want to sell certificates with... I have to by my EWT today for the whole year. Then as I use services the EWT is released to the utility nodes that rendered the service.
Staking is also coming which will further dry up supply. The way I think it will work is that we can stake against utility nodes so that as they get paid for services we get a percentage. Should be in the next few months but no date confirmed on staking start.
Last point is that because energy web is an EVM any dapp developer can launch something on it. They have a wasm compiler which means millions of devs can code smart contracts without knowing solidity. There's going to be millions of energy assets on chain this year. I believe there will be an energy dapp run similar to DeFi in the coming years. So this "general" dapp development will provide further scarcity / gas fees and invester awareness.
Here's a good post on reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnergyWeb/comments/l7731j/why_energy_web_is_bigger_then_you_think/
