On our mission to decentralize and decarbonize power and mobility, we announced the partnership with NRverse two weeks ago. The focus is on a joint NFTicket and certificate solution to make, among other, your metaverse or any other event greener and proof the origin of used renewable energies. Following this, we hosted a tech debate together with the co-founders Loic Tilman and Kai Schmied in which we interviewed them about their motivation, vision, challenges and the magical algorithm behind their smart technology. bloXmove and NRverse are convinced, all of us should get an idea of the metaverse sooner than later. Recently consultancies like McKinsey, Accenture and Capgemini published their research saying the metaverse will generate up to $5 trillion in impact by 2030—about the size of Japan’s economy, the world’s third-largest. And 95 percent of the top executives in large companies believe the metaverse will have a positive impact on their industries. Sounds promising!
The video of the recorded session can be found on our YouTube channel, click here if you want to watch the full recording.
Let’s start with the familiar ice breaker question – opened the CEO and moderator Sophia Rödiger the 5th tech debate and asked CTO Harry Behrens: What was your main highlight and learning along the BLXM Development Roadmap since our last tech debate? If you are interested in reading the full Q2 transparency update, click here.
Harry: I would give two highlights… 1) we are now entering a substantial phase: our go live on the CELO and Energy Web networks. Albeit still on their test nets, but that process has started now so we’re beginning to install parts of the platform on the Energy Web chain as well as on the future main net CELO… 2) and the other part is a takeaway as a thank you for a) our community as well as b) our tech team. When we launched our investor portal, we were quite ambitious and launched substantial new functions which included liquidity, staking etc.… and there were bugs. But the way the community interacted with all of this and reported the issues, how our team then picked it up and fixed it in the end taught us the main lesson: focus on your customer, especially in crypto. It’s all about the tech, yes, but even before that, it’s about the customer so you need to engage, engage, engage.
After the short appetizer and reflection on the last weeks of tech development, Sophia introduced the special guests Loic and Kai as the tech and energy geeks of their own startup NRverse as well as innovators at the energy provider Elia group / 50hertz.
Kai added on that. NRverse stands for NR = energy, verse = metaverse. Our vision is to offer solutions to decarbonize decentralized software such as Metaverse, crypto and other applications. We also know that the best way to reduce carbon emission is to avoid them. Therefore, our concept is built on renewable energy certificates. They are the best way to prove that your electricity consumption is based on renewable, zero-emission electricity. We focus currently on three things:
The following explainer video gives more insights into how NRverse is working. Please click here to watch!
Harry started to explain in greater detail what’s the technology behind the partnership, and what’s the role of bloXmove in it. Let’s make it quite specific and use the NRverse flow to explain the overall tech concept for a metaverse event:
Sophia underlines that this is an important puzzle piece in bloXmove’s Vision of a decentralized Mobility Alliance. Why? Because people want to reach destinations and unlock experiences in their life. We do not buy a ticket for the train, because the 6-hour-train-ride is such a nice and luxurious thing, it is about the places we want to achieve. So at the end, bloXmove is connecting business partners from transport operators towards the location providers – this could be a soccer game, a museum, a hotel. It is about mobility from door to door. And this explains how NFTickets and NRverse fit into bloXmove’s big picture.
Loic added his perspective from NRverse side on the calculator notably: the calculator provides input to the smart contract co-developed with Bloxmove in order to size the need of renewables energy across the globe, and guess what… it is no magic: we bound it to 2 pillars, benchmarking on one side and modeling on the other side. For the benchmarking we use proxy as other game or studies to evaluate the overall consumption of the servers, the networking and the end-user device. For some use cases modelization is possible, for example for proof of work transaction. In that case we develop a model, which is also based on partnerships with expert institutions. This gives a view on electricity and location then even carbon if you add carbon intensity of the grid. As a result, when you couple the calculator to the smart contracts NFT-Cert and NFTicket, the solution enables to shift from tokenization to productization of sustainability using the power of NFT’s. In the first step we focus on metaverse related products but it could also, in future, even be ‘phygital’ experience – because I believe virtual and physical spaces will be immersed in. That is the base to develop new business models in all areas where a sustainable aspect can be added to an experience and materialized with products… and this is our USP. If you look then at the competition, we see multiple tokenization competitors offsetting some in the space of Renewable Energy Certificate System (REC) but none yet on productization of consumption-based analysis – which could even be in real time in future. And that’s really the sweet spot – NRverse brings a unique product through the service of calculation – at the next level: a real time calculation. The scalability is huge: Our solution can be applied to any service that consumes electricity. The magic is indeed the simplicity and flexibility of our solution. We provide very easy access to renewable energies and can put these proofs in any form. This can be a ticket for a metaverse event where renewable energy is already part of the ticket. It can be used to cover electric vehicle charging sessions by matching the consumption of the EV with a specific energy source that produces electricity at the same time. That shows the link to the mobility sector and bloXmove’s products. Our solution goes beyond the tokenization of certificates or CO2 offsets. We provide calculation models to estimate the electricity consumption (and in the future also the CO2 consumption) and offer one solution that covers it. Clients need to provide us with a basic set of information on their IT infrastructure and we do the rest. The magic of the algorithm is our secret sauce.
Sophia: What are your main challenge and target right now; can and if yes, how can our bloXmove community support the success of NRverse and our partnership?
Kai: Well since we are a startup our target is to scale and to identify new clients. SWe are facing the classical challenges that every startup is facing: Finding the balance between developing new solutions & managing resources carefully. That’s why if you are looking for bright start-up investment in the space of tech and sustainability, we will be more than ever happy to connect. Our short-term target: We are putting in place two projects:
We will make this a success as a first target and develop a product out of it (there is a lot of potential in the ticketing system but also in event management). In the long run we want to increase our product portfolio and enter 24/7 renewable energy certificates. This is the holy grail of proving renewable energy consumption. It is much more complex, but we want to be one of the first companies that offer solutions in this field. We will also complement with high quality CO2 offsetting when needed.
Loic: as said previously, metaverse and NFT platforms are the first applications we target. But ultimately any application consuming ‘decentral’ could apply, so could be web3 but not only any edge computing or decentralized infrastructure like the gaming platform ‘Roblox’ for example has many servers all over the world or even if you think about it Netflix has a mix of edge infrastructure and AWS. Now coming back to our focus, we start with Web3 and more specifically to NFT, crypto metaverse and others. For each of these we can distinguish different layers (from the very big players web3 native to brands from the classy and traditional fashion, sports industries. It is a big trend right now, to enter the metaverse. Why metaverse? Because this is a huge consumer of energy, companies cannot underline sustainability targets and promises on the one hand, and on the other hand, they don’t take care of their CO2 emissions during such remote sessions or metaverse events. Big brands like Mercedes, Hyundai etc. enter web3 for the first time, and they are very sensitive towards sustainability because they don’t want to be accused of wasting resources. Moreover, we see smaller brands especially in digital fashion that moved from conventional fashion towards digital fashion to reduce the environmental footprint of their products. These brands even have dedicated sustainability officers which is our buying persona. The big advantage of our product is that it is web3 native. We can just plug in and do not need to explain what an NFT or a token is…
Sophia summarized: we start with the relevant metaverse events; but what’s coming next? How can we utilize the concept and technology in further areas?
Harry’s vision is about using bloXmove’s NFTicket protocol for any use case in which we need an access control, a digital ticket, a prepaid budget, a certificate linked to verification, payment and instant settlement. Our way of using verified credentials in a collectible and tradable NFT is unique but will become a standard in the next few years. Quote me on that, was the bold statement of bloXmove’s CTO.
Loic said, from an infrastructure perspective of course NRverse is not focusing on Germany only, from a client perspective we go where the market is starting from US and Europe. We are very flexible in terms of regional focus because we can supply renewable energy globally. Our product is fully scalable. With regards to market sizes a lot is happening in the US, therefore I am in SF right now.
Sophia mentioned one of the latest researches by McKinsey saying that people will spend up to 5 hours per day in the metaverse. It could generate up to $5 trillion in impact by 2030. The metaverse ecosystem is way more than gaming or shopping, it can improve city services, planning, administration, support for virtual tourism as well as learning and education offerings.
The two guest speakers told about their personal use case of the metaverse and summarized the vision like that: Our vision is that we exactly know the digital footprint of all our activities and that we have technology to make it green. No matter if I navigate through the real or the digital world, I can prove that I move without causing CO2 emissions. I rent a car (green), I book a hotel (green website), I enter a metaverse concert (green). Regarding the main metaverse use cases I see a lot of potential in social interaction and entertainment. So, we will experience new ways of how we interact in the virtual world that will be like real world experiences (concerts, digital fashion & mixed reality applications). But also, in the health sector be it sports, therapy or meditation. It’s about the convergence of physical and digital.
It was the first bloXmove tech debate with external, special guests. THANKS to Loic and Kai. We are glad to announce the joint green metaverse event which will take place in the Decentraland in August. Stay tuned and follow the bloXmove and NRverse social media channels to get invited to the event. Last but most important: we are happy to reward one session winner with a special NFT give away during the upcoming event: the winner is our telegram bloXmover: @bithodler1, please send us a DM.
Meet NRverse on social media:
webpage: https://my.nrverse.io/
linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/nrverse/?originalSubdomain=de
twitter: https://twitter.com/nr_verse
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