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It’s Hard to Fund Midsize Green Assets. This Tokenization Startup Wants to Change That

Published

3 месяца ago

10 января, 2025

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The U.S. renewable energy industry is in an odd position.

Large-scale projects, like SunZia, the southwestern wind turbine project that is expected to provide enough electricity to power three million homes, are funded with relative ease thanks to long-established relationships with financial giants. Meanwhile, small-scale installations such as solar panels on one’s rooftop are becoming cheaper to implement by the day.

But the consolidation of the energy sector is making it increasingly difficult for mid-sized projects to get the financing they need. These ventures, which are typically worth less than $100 million, are too pricey for regular people to pay for, yet too modest for financial heavyweights to take an interest in them.

That’s where Plural Energy steps in. The two-year-old tokenization firm enables mid-sized renewable energy projects to raise funds from investors on-chain, with the double-aim of dramatically expanding the number of people who can invest in renewable energy assets while also developing new kinds of financial products for the energy sector.

“Right now, the process of raising capital for solar is just unacceptable. We’re never going to hit our climate goals,” Adam Silver, co-founder and CEO of Plural Energy, told CoinDesk in an interview. “[We want] to make an easy button for capital raising for good climate assets.”

“By taking advantage of tokenization, we can essentially unlock all of the magic that happens in DeFi ecosystems, and bring it to an industry that’s desperately in need of financial innovation,” Silver added.

Pitching to Plural Energy

Investors can access four types of products through Plural Energy. The first is small-scale asset-backed instruments, like a project bundling 1,000 rooftop solar installations into a single security, which is then tokenized. The second category is development-stage renewables, and the third is operating renewables (for example pre-existing solar plants that seek to raise additional funds to expand).

The fourth category, Silver said, is the “weird stuff,” like a battery that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to trade, or the bitcoin (BTC) mine being built by Sangha Renewables on a West Texas solar plant operated by an energy company. “Things that are a little bit out of the ordinary for traditional infrastructure investors, but are really cool to everyone else,” Silver said.

So far, the majority of these projects have involved solar power in one form or another, but Plural has also looked into wind-based initiatives and even a hydropower deal.

Yet these projects didn’t make it past Plural’s due diligence. To date, a total of five deals, representing $40 million, have been given the green light to raise funds through the platform. Only 5% of the deals considered by Plural make it to the finish line, but that hasn’t discouraged demand for the platform, which currently has around $150 million, across a dozen assets, to bring on board in the coming months.

“When a renewable energy company comes to us, we put it through our broker-dealer due diligence process, and then we also do asset due diligence,” Silver said. “We make sure that it’s like an asset that really any one of us would feel comfortable investing in personally.”

While broker-dealers must ensure that investors aren’t getting scammed, they aren’t necessarily responsible for making sure that something is a good investment. Nevertheless, the Plural team insists on only presenting deals that it’s confident in, Silver said.

The first ever project greenlit by Plural took six months to complete the process from start to finish, from agreeing to tokenize with Plural to a live tokenized security offering. That timeline has now been brought down to six weeks.

Plural’s business model and technologies “open up capital markets to the most sensible pool of investors, streamline the fundraising process, and provide transparency to all parties,” Spencer Marr, president of Sangha Renewables, told CoinDesk.

Investing through Plural Energy

Once they’ve been given the nod, issuers on Plural get to choose what types of securities they want to offer — like common equity, convertible notes with interest, or unsecured convertible notes. Each of these security instruments receives a unique token in the back-end. Investors then get to choose what kind of security they want, and receive the appropriate tokens for it.

But each deal comes with its own unique requirements. For example, one project gave retail investors the opportunity to invest as little as $500 in a portfolio of solar projects. In the case of Sangha’s bitcoin mine, however, the deal is only open for accredited investors, with a minimum investment of $50,000.

Plural is a registered transfer agent, meaning that it maintains the ownership documents, known as cap tables, of the projects financed through its platform. Under Plural’s system, each tokenized security gets its own on-chain cap table, the data from which is then cross-referenced with a Know-Your-Customer (KYC) database to generate an SEC-compliant cap table.

“The only way you can change who owns what [in the project] is by changing who owns what token. So the original source of action and movement is on-chain, and then it’s recorded in that off-chain database,” Silver said.

The code behind Plural’s transfer agent protocol is already open-source, he added, and the firm plans on publishing its transfer agent standard operating procedures as well. “We should not have a regulatory moat by having a transfer agent license,” Silver said. “That should not stand in the way between people accessing tokenization.”

Initially built on Base but now expanding to other EVM-compatible networks like Avalanche and Arbitrum, Plural offers a variety of payment options, including MetaMask, credit cards, ACH payments and wire transfers. While the company is mostly focused on U.S. investors, Silver said that Plural was mindful of international investors wanting exposure to the platform’s assets.

“Our first deal had Canadians and Europeans, but just because we had them doesn’t mean it’s good enough,” Silver said. “We have an opportunity to make a much cleaner and better investing experience for international investors that can perhaps simplify their regulatory burden in the U.S. and then also their tax burden.”

Green energy tokens in DeFi

Blockchain technology doesn’t just allow Plural to access a broader array of investors; it also enables innovations in terms of the platform’s payment systems.

One area the eight-person team is focusing on is using smart contracts to simplify payment terms, or how a given project splits its proceeds. For example, waterfall distribution schedules can see the project forward 98% of dividends to investors up to a threshold, and then evenly split the rest between investor and issuer.

“With smart contracts, the headache of administering and calculating all of that just completely goes away,” Silver said. “Now our issuers make a single payment into Plural and then smart contracts automate all the distributions according to business rules.”

Even better, Plural’s smart contracts track the trading of these tokenized securities, meaning that if an investor holds the token for the first 10 days of a month, then sells it to someone else for the remaining 20 days, the first investor will receive a third of the dividend, while the second will receive two-thirds. “We’re able to get closer to that real-time finance and just remove all that administration,” Silver said.

That opens up the possibility of Plural-issued tokens being used in the broader crypto economy, especially in decentralized finance (DeFi). Investors could eventually post their tokenized securities as collateral the same way on-chain market participants already use ether (ETH), stablecoins and various other cryptocurrencies. “It’s just a more usable product if you can borrow against it,” Silver said.

Assets tokenized by Plural could also end up being traded on decentralized exchanges, which would help bring them liquidity. “I don’t think it’s going to be easy, but I do think that figuring out how to take those liquidity principles and bring them into Plural is huge, and might be coming, hopefully sometime soon.”

Down the line, Plural’s assets could even end up spawning their own derivatives, and even split the generated interest from the tokenized security the same way DeFi protocol Pendle does.

“Either my kids, or my grandkids, or hopefully me — I really think we will get to a point where it’s faster to move between cash and clean energy assets than it is to move between checkings and savings accounts,” Silver said.

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Kraken Secures Restricted Dealer Status in Canada Amid ‘Turning Point’ for Crypto in the Country

Published

4 часа ago

2 апреля, 2025

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Crypto exchange Kraken has registered as a restricted dealer in Canada, allowing the exchange to continue offering crypto trading services to Canadian users under the country’s evolving regulatory framework.

The registration, announced on Tuesday, comes after a multi-year process that required exchanges to meet higher standards for investor protection and governance. Kraken said it worked closely with Canadian regulators during this pre-registration phase, upgrading its compliance systems and internal controls to meet expectations set by the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC).

To lead its Canadian expansion, Kraken named Cynthia Del Pozo as general manager for North America. Del Pozo, a fintech and operations veteran, will oversee strategy, regulatory engagement and business development across the region.

“Canada is at a turning point for crypto adoption,” said Del Pozo in a statement, pointing to growing interest from both retail and institutional investors. A recent survey cited by Kraken found that 30% of Canadian investors currently hold crypto assets.

Kraken also announced it will offer free Interac e-Transfer deposits for Canadian users, a move aimed at reducing friction for newcomers to the platform. The exchange claims it doubled its team and user base in Canada over the last two years and now manages over $2 billion CAD in client assets.

Mayur Gupta, Kraken’s chief marketing officer and general manager of growth, will be speaking at CoinDesk’s Consensus 2025 in Toronto on May 14-15.

Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy.

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The Protocol: Vana Introduces Token Standard for Data-Backed Assets

Published

6 часов ago

2 апреля, 2025

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Welcome to The Protocol, CoinDesk’s weekly wrap-up of the most important stories in cryptocurrency tech development. I’m Ben Schiller.

In this issue:

Vana launches token standard

Hashgraph to debut private blockchain

ASICs will look more like servers

An interview with Gensyn’s Ben Fielding

This article is featured in the latest issue of The Protocol, our weekly newsletter exploring the tech behind crypto, one block at a time. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Wednesday.

Network News

VANA’S DATA-BACKED TOKEN STANDARD: Crypto enthusiasts might have heard of the ERC-20 token standard, which provides guidelines to ensure that tokens created on the Ethereum smart contract blockchain are compatible and can interact with other tokens and applications within the network. A similar standard for data-backed tokens, called VRC-20, has now emerged. Vana, an EVM-compatible Layer 1 blockchain that helps users monetize personal data by bundling it into DataDAOs for AI model training, introduced the new standard early this week to boost trust and transparency in the market for data-backed digital assets. The VRC-20 standard design includes specific criteria such as fixed supply, governance, and liquidity rules while ensuring real data access by tying tokens to actual data utility. Additionally, it promotes continuous liquidity through rewards that ensure market stability. «This isn’t speculation. This is real financialization of data,» Vana noted on X. Vana launched its mainnet in December, with VANA as its native cryptocurrency. Since then, the network has onboarded over 12 million data points through multiple DataDAOs, reflecting strong demand for user-owned data. DataDAOs or data liquidity pools are decentralized marketplaces that bring data on-chain as transferable digital tokens. DLPs are where data is contributed, tokenized and made ready for use in applications such as AI model training. — Omkar Godbole Read more.

HASHGRAPH LINES UP Q3 PRIVATE CHAIN: Hashgraph, the blockchain development firm focusing on the Hedera (HBAR) network, is building a private, permissioned blockchain for enterprises in highly regulated industries with plans to debut in the third quarter of 2025. HashSphere, built with Hedera’s technology, aims to bridge private and public distributed ledgers, ensuring compliance with regulations while maintaining interoperability, the company said Monday. Hashgraph is looking to provide services to asset managers, banks and payment providers seeking secure, low-cost cross-border transactions with stablecoins.While public blockchains offer security and transparency, enterprises in industries like finance and payments often face compliance challenges, particularly with know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) requirements. HashSphere addresses this by restricting access to verified participants, enabling firms to develop tokenized assets, AI-powered services and other blockchain-based products while meeting regulatory standards. The network also integrates Hedera’s existing tools, including the Token Service for managing digital assets and the Consensus Service for recording transactions with trusted timestamps. The platform is compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM), allowing developers to deploy decentralized applications using Solidity and other EVM languages. — Kris Sandor Read more.

ASICS TO BE MORE LIKE SERVERS: In the beginning, there were only CPUs, then GPUs, for bitcoin mining. Then came the mighty ASIC in 2013, and with it, the “shoebox” form factor that has become emblematic of the bitcoin mining industry. What comes next? ASIC manufacturers are increasingly betting on a hydro-cooled server rack design to become a substantial portion of bitcoin mining fleets, leaning into the “direct-to-chip” cooling for further efficiency gains. Last September, Bitmain announced its model U3S21EXPH developed in a partnership with Hut 8. Its U3 design means that one unit takes up three spaces in a traditional server rack. MicroBT soon followed with its M63 Hydro series, as did Bitdeer’s Sealminer A2 Hydro unit. Following suit, Auradine released its server rack model, the AH3880, this March. Its U2 design, which occupies two server slots, is a bit smaller, but it packs more hashrate per unit of space at 600 TH/s (or 300 TH/s per slot) versus Bitmain’s 860 TH/s (286.66 TH/s per slot). The benefit of a server rack ASIC lies in standardization. Bitcoin miners are increasingly marching in step with the traditional datacenter industry, and that industry could see 40% adoption of direct liquid-to-chip cooling by 2026, according to data center developer Cyrus One. If miners adopt this design, then theoretically, they can optimize their supply chains by converging on server designs that are becoming best practice in the big-boy data center sector. — Colin Harper, Blockspace Read more.

GENSYN CEO BEN FIELDING: Ten years ago, when he was still a young AI researcher beginning his PhD track, Ben Fielding explored how “swarms” of AI — clusters of many different models — could talk to each other and learn from each other, which might improve the collective whole. There was just one problem: He was handcuffed by the realities of that noisy machine beneath his desk. And he knew he was outgunned by Google and other Big Tech. Compute constraints would always be an issue, he realized. The solution? Decentralized AI. Fielding co-founded Gensyn (along with Harry Grieve) in 2020, or years before Decentralized AI became fashionable. The project was initially known for building decentralized compute, but the vision is actually something wider: “The network for machine intelligence.” They’re building solutions up and down the tech stack. And now, a decade after Fielding’s noisy desk annoyed his lab-mates, the early tools of Gensyn are out in the wild. Gensyn recently released its “RL Swarms” protocol (a descendant of Fielding’s PhD work) and just launched its Testnet — which brings blockchain into the fold. Fielding talked with Jeff Wilser about AI Swarms, how blockchain snaps into the puzzle, and shares why all innovators — not just tech giants — “should have the right to build machine learning technologies.” — Jeff Wilser Read more.

In Other News

Web3 lacks a dedicated memory layer, making its current architecture inefficient and difficult to scale. Random Linear Network Coding (RLNC) offers a solution by enhancing data propagation and storage efficiency in decentralized systems. Implementing RLNC can address Web3’s scalability challenges by optimizing memory and data access without compromising decentralization, says Muriel Médard, co-founder of Optimum. Read her op-ed here.

Ripple, an enterprise-focused blockchain service closely tied to the XRP Ledger (XRP), said on Wednesday it has integrated its stablecoin to the company’s cross-border payments system to boost adoption for Ripple USD (RLUSD). Select Ripple Payments customers including cross-border payment providers BKK Forex and iSend are already using the stablecoin to improve their treasury operations, the company said. Ripple plans to further expand the token’s availability of its token to payments customers. RLUSD reached a $244 million market capitalization, growing 87% over the past month. — Kris Sandor reports.

Regulatory and Policy

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped or paused over a dozen ongoing cases (and lost one) since U.S. President Donald Trump retook office just over two months ago and appointed Commissioner Mark Uyeda as acting chair. Here is a rundown of what’s left on the SEC’s enforcement docket. — Nik De reports.

Calendar

April 8-10: Paris Blockchain Week

April 30-May 1: Token 2049, Dubai

May 14-16: Consensus, Toronto

May 20-22: Avalanche Summit, London

May 27-29: Bitcoin 2025, Las Vegas

June 30-July 3: EthCC, Cannes

Oct. 1-2: Token2049, Singapore

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President Trump to Order ‘Reciprocal Tariffs’ to Begin at Midnight

Published

7 часов ago

2 апреля, 2025

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In a Rose Garden ceremony on Wednesday, U.S. President Donald Trump said he intends to immediately sign an order for «reciprocal tariffs» to be levied against U.S. trading partners.

«Our country and its taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years but it’s not going to happen anymore,» said Trump, adding that the tariffs will begin at midnight.

The first specific tariff announced at the ceremony was a 25% levy on all foreign-made autos.

Among country-specific tariffs: China will see a rate of 34%, Vietnam 46%, Taiwan 32% South Korea 25%, Switzerland 31%.

The price of bitcoin (BTC) initially rose in the ceremony’s early stages, but began to give ground as the tariffs were detailed. The price has retreated to $86,000, down about 1% from prior to the announcements.