Leading European utilities have teamed up to test blockchain-based trading in the wholesale energy market.

According to the official release, the peer-to-peer energy trading will take place on an enhanced Enerchain framework. Innovative software company Ponton’s Enerchain is a blockchain-based application that has been used to execute the first European energy trade over the blockchain at last year’s EMART conference in Amsterdam.

Using encryption technology, Enerchain, powered by Tendermint, allows trading organisations to anonymously send orders to a decentralised orderbook which can be hit by other trading organisations. All this is done peer-to-peer without a central marketplace operated by a third party. Partner and provider of the trading screen technology in the project is pdv Financial Software GmbH, a sister company of Ponton.

23 European energy trading firms have already joined the project and Ponton is in discussion with further interested companies.

“Blockchain technology is a new way to create disruptive software applications and business models. After having experienced increasing marketing buzz from the FinTech and energy sectors, PONTON has decided to actually implement an own blockchain stack on top of the Tendermint software. The project practically shows the power of the blockchain by creating a marketplace that does not require a physically centralised platform. Enerchain® demonstrates what can be expected for the future in related areas of energy trading: P2P wholesale trading, flexibility trading in the regional grid, and synchronising grid management processes between TSOs and DSOs”, Michael Merz, managing director of Ponton said.

During the proof of concept, participants will get significant exposure to the blockchain technology and determine whether it can support the current trading volumes and transactional speed. The early mover group participants have agreed to share the required development costs in order to proof the concept with a full-scale prototype which is integrated into their existing trading infrastructure and supports a decentralised credit limit solution required for bilateral trading.

The variety of participants is reflected in the broad range of traded products, including forward trades, spot trades, load curves and more exotic trades – all with physical delivery – as well as the focus on regional markets, the release said.

The proof of concept will run until the end of this year. The participants intend to start live trading on Enerchain in the fourth quarter. If successful, Enerchain would become the first blockchain-based P2P trading system going live for wholesale energy products.