Why tokenized smart batteries are a ‘net new asset class’

Renewable energy storage solution Entheos is partnering with Plural Energy, a renewable energy tokenization platform, to enable investors to finance the first-ever portfolio of smart battery assets.

Entheos is co-founded by former MakerDAO contributor Teej Ragsdale, who closed a $100 million deal, driven by DAI, with Huntingdon Valley Bank to bring DeFi liquidity into the real world. 

The company is now looking to fund smart batteries — an emerging asset class — using DeFi rails. Smart batteries are software-embedded batteries that can store and release energy based on intelligent technology. One commonplace example? An iPhone’s battery. 

They’re one mechanism in play to solve the unpredictability of renewable power sources, like solar and wind, which are highly dependent on weather conditions. When those renewable systems do capture energy, inefficient batteries often prevent a full conversion into power. 

People who are interested in the technology can, for the first time, now utilize blockchain technology to purchase Entheos tokens and invest in the technology’s potential via tokenization.

User and investor appetite for tokenization has remained steady over the last few months. 

“Battery operating systems aren’t really using software to their full advantage,” Ragsdale told Blockworks. “Battery systems generate all sorts of inefficiencies and losses…what you want to be able to do is [ensure] the battery is smart enough to be filling itself up when prices are low and discharging when prices are high.”

Enter smart batteries. Their proponents say they’re necessary to ensure renewable energy solutions run effectively using grid stability. 

At the core of Entheos’ aspirations is to harvest data and control smart batteries in a much more granular way, according to Ragsdale.

“A traditional battery is not really a great asset for investors, and we’re making it much more attractive by monitoring data and controlling these batteries in a much more dynamic way,” he said. “We are building software that’s smart enough to monitor weather and pricing conditions, fill up [the battery] when it is low, and discharge when it is high.”

‘Built on crypto rails from the start’

The idea behind Entheos teaming up with Plural Energy is to allow anyone interested in Entheos to easily invest in their work. 

DeFi participants will be able to purchase Entheos’s compliant, on-chain security tokens via Plural’s tokenization platform, which also features other real world assets. 

Investors who choose to purchase the tokens will also be able to track the performance of the assets they have invested in, Adam Silver, co-founder and CEO of Plural Energy said. 

“We want to make it easy and simple to connect the on-chain capital markets that are financing these assets to the off-chain performance and risk that exists with these assets,” Silver said.

This can be achieved using Plural’s decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN), Illuminet, Silver said. 

“We’ve built a DePIN network that essentially shows all on-chain investors what is happening with the battery via trusted and verified data integrations with the Blockchain,” he said.

The idea is to bring investors data and information on an industry that is usually hidden behind walled gardens, ultimately enabling individual investors the opportunity to make their own investment decisions. 

“What Adam and I are setting out to do is give rise to a completely new asset class that through better investments, we can accelerate the deployment of the underlying infrastructure,” Ragsdale said. “This is a net new asset class built on crypto rails from the start, in the right way.”

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