At Keyko, we’re convinced that Web3 tech can be used to solve real business problems, well beyond crypto applications. That’s why we get excited when big, corporate companies enlist us to help them discover the potential of this innovative technology.
One such company that approached us was global energy giant E.ON.
Beyond Engineering
Born out of a desire to explore the possibilities of tokenization, NFTs and blockchain in general, the E.ON innovation team reached out to us. We were happy to take up their challenge, as the scope included some time for exploration and discovery.
See, we like to think that one of Keyko’s key differentiators is that we understand business complexity. Our CEO as well as other non-technical team members have extensive experience in corporate environments. So the E.ON team involved us early on, to help create value at the pre-building stage.
Through a series of carefully planned workshops, explaining and exploring the pros and cons of the Web3 tech stack, we quickly settled on a very relevant use case for the energy industry: the obtuse and analog world of carbon credits.
The buying and selling of carbon credits is typically an OTC business, where the middleman wields a lot of power. An ecological project that supplies carbon credits does not get access to the buyer side and doesn’t get a clear picture on how the platform in the middle charges fees. Plus, the process of acquiring these credits is antiquated and analog. Read: expensive.
The Innovation team realized that this was a chance to leverage E.ON’s reputation and create a digital equivalent to streamline this process and unlock a new line of business.
The right tool for the right job
Once we moved into the production phase, we collaborated with consultancy firm and subject matter experts Roland Berger to identify the key features and functionalities. Again, by involving a senior project manager with 2 decades of experience in the ‘traditional’ world, we managed to understand the needs of all stakeholders and translate those to tech requirements. Communication is key at this stage and we speak both key languages: those of business unit managers as well as coders.
It’s only at that stage that we started looking at tech architecture. One of the Keyko principles is that we don’t build everything from scratch, but use the right tool for the right job. Over the years, we got to know which Web3 technologies stack well and, importantly, what integrates with Web2 IT solutions. While we have developed groundbreaking pieces of code ourselves, our tech team also keeps a list of tried and tested components.
In this case, we used some production-ready components from the Nevermined stack, as they fitted the requirements perfectly: tokenization, smart contract building and a marketplace framework. Moreover, these components could be modified for E.ON’s needs with minimal tweaking.
From needs to tech solutions
The E.ON platform required transparency, so we set up a way to tokenize Carbon Credits, effectively turning them into NFTs. First of all, this added full on-chain provenance to the certificate. On top of that, the tech component came with a token burning mechanism, which makes the process of retiring a certificate (when a buyer ‘uses’ the carbon credits) more transparent and efficient.
The E.ON platform required a high degree of asset control, so we implemented an Access Control component. This effectively adds smart contract conditions to the NFT aka the certificate. As a result, buyers are guaranteed unique access, as long as payment has been made. Automating this part of the business process improves the efficiency (and cost) dramatically.
And finally, the E.ON platform required a marketplace, so using Nevermined’s Marketplace Framework was a no-brainer. Let’s just say it took longer for the frontend design to be finished than to implement that part of the infrastructure.
Accelerate time-to-market
Looking back at it, it’s the combination of two Keyko values that drove this project forward. In a hyper-competitive world, time is always of the essence, so by truly understanding the business objectives and by building in the most efficient way possible, we accelerate the time-to-market.
In the case of E.ON, it took us a little over 3 months to go from “hello, we want to do something with blockchain, can you help us”, to a solution that showed the E.ON team how to solve an existing business problem with Web3 technology.
And that’s why all of our team members, tech and non-tech, get out of bed in the morning.
We don’t just build correctly. We also build the correct thing.
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