Industry-Led Blockchain Projects for Smart Grids: An In-Depth Inspection

In this paper, we investigate industry-led blockchain projects in the field of smart grids. Our investigation is guided by five research questions related to each industry-led project: (1) is the project active? (2) what smart grid applications does the project target? (3) what technical approach does the project take? (4) what is the maturity level of the project? and (5) what we can learn from the success or failure of the project? Our findings show that only a few projects are still active, and many have been terminated when the funding was exhausted. Nevertheless, the few active projects give us hope that sustainable technical approaches in conjunction with sound business models could lead to long-term blockchain-based projects in smart grids. Most of the active projects are targeting energy trading and using custom tokens to incentivize the production of green energy and energy savings. Furthermore, it appears that layer-2 blockchains are becoming the preferred platform for achieving high throughput with low transaction fees while preserving the security and trust of traditional large public blockchains.