Energi cryptocurrency and its NRG token hope to achieve global adoption by combining smart contract functionality, decentralized governance and self-funding treasury system.
What Is Energi?
Launched in April 2018, the Energi platform spent much of the next year clearing its way to the top 100 coin club, which it is a member of as of August 2019. The platform’s main selling point is its insistence on delivering a widespread and global adoption of crypto technology by means of offering its self-funding treasury system and community-based governance. Energi prides itself on featuring a robust masternode-focused reward system based on substantial allocations of generated NRG tokens to them. Here, the masternodes act as permanently active nodes that keep a full copy of the blockchain, while taking care of validating, storing and broadcasting transactions.
As such, Energi has some of the largest allocation levels among the masternode-based blockchains, with some 40% of its native NRG coins going to the platform’s masternodes. Since approximately 1 million NRG are released on a monthly basis, and the platform features no cap on their supply, its sustainability potential should be theoretically limitless.
Masternodes also handle governance, consensus enforcing and similar events, with the Energi’s system being described as the “built-in” decentralized governance system. It allows each stakeholder to make a proposal which is deliberated on by the Energi community members.
How Did Energy Project Start?
Energi started out as a fork of the Dash source code, without being an actual fork of Dash blockchain itself. This means that Energi and Dash addresses are not mutually compatible. The Energi project was conceived by one Tommy World Power in mid-2017 when he decided to start working on self-funding and economically viable cryptocurrency which would focus on smart contracts and utilization of token emissions as sources of growth. He was subsequently joined by the team of specialists with backgrounds in cryptocurrencies finance, economics, marketing, and development.
The project featured no initial coin offering (ICO), out of the team’s desire to prevent centralization of the network and promote fairness and transparency in its place. The project went on without securing funding by public investors either, relying instead on large airdrop campaigns. After the launches of Energi 1.0 and 2.0, the project is in the Energi 3.0 stage of development. After its completion, Energi is supposed to become the first crypto to combine strong treasury and funding system, smart contracts and on-chain governance within a single platform. This version is planned for the release in 2020.
What Is Energi Attempting to Achieve?
Energi project is built around a set of goals which have remained relatively fixed over time, despite the platform’s technological evolution such as its migration from earlier Proof of Work to the current Proof of Stake model:
- Energi wants to propel cryptocurrencies from being adopted slowly to becoming a massively accepted technology with global outreach. This is to be achieved by building a strong foundation for the Energi platform, based on adherence to the principles of “trust, awareness, usability and availability”. The first leg of this foundation rests on having a large decentralized treasury (described as “four times greater than that of Dash, Decred and PIVX”) combined with on-chain governance model. The second one is the Energi’s network of masternodes which can vote on the allocations of accumulated funds. As the masternodes remain tasked with handling governance, security and transactions throughout the network, the Treasury is supposed to provide theoretically perpetual funding for all services the platform provides to its community, including compensation for the developers.
- Stability of the Energi platform should be ensured by keeping the funds circulating in its own ecosystem. Stability of the masternodes in the Energi ecosystem is ensured by means of so-called Earndrop airdrop campaigns, in which the community members receive NRG tokens and earn additional ones through their participation in brand promotion efforts. The community which grows around the project is involved in the promo activities on the social media in exchange for rewards in NRG tokens. By this, the platform hopes to become self-sustaining and efficient system capable of investing in its campaigns independently. This idea came as a response to what Energi developers saw as an “overkill” in the Bitcoin’s distribution of mining rewards. To them, the mining systems found with other cryptocurrencies are described as having an effect of a “tax” or “inflation”, which they see as a wasted potential limiting their currencies’ growth.
- Energi wants to create a platform capable of supporting decentralized applications (dApps) and smart contracts for the delivery of diverse digital services. With the focus on the usefulness potential of supported smart contracts, the Energi platform will provide a range of services for both new and existing developers and ICO organizers. These include Energi Incubator Program (dedicated to supporting blockchain startups looking to work with the Energi), Energi Defense and the Energi Bureau of Investigations (EBI), Energi Engineering Support, Energi Development Portal (EDP) and Energi Marketing Toolkit (EMT). At the same time, the Energi treasury is planned to support thousands of developers’ projects worldwide, with the help of the database of metrics and assessments the platform partners can use to monitor their projects and evaluate their conformity with the existing industry standards.
How Does Energi Work?
Masternodes are found at the heart of the Energi’s mode of operation. Hosting a masternode on the Energi platform requires one to stake 10,000 NRG, with the promise of access to the functions of the platform. As Energi emerged from the foundations of Dash, it comes with the features such as PrivateSend and InstantSend, together with the promise of offering these with lower fees and higher transaction speeds. PrivateSend should give one financial privacy by obscuring the origins of the funds while InstantSend is designed to compete with nearly instantaneous transaction systems such as credit cards, without relying on a centralized authority.
The rewards for establishing, hosting and maintaining a masternode come in form of NRG tokens which are distributed from the emission-based allocations with the following ratio:
- 10% of tokens go to Stakers
- 10% to the Energi Backbone
- 40% to Masternodes
- 40% to the Treasury
Energi features block time of 1 minute and 2 Mb block size and the scalability of the platform is achieved by growing the number of fully active nodes on it. Setting up a masternode on the Energi still requires a user to demonstrate at least moderate technical competency, but the platform’s team tries to alleviate this by providing a detailed guide on a masternode setup.
What Is the Role of NRG?
Envisioned as a global network consisting of dApps and smart contracts, Energi hopes that its unique properties will serve to increase the value of the NRG token by turning it into a main means of exchange not just with dApps, but with regular payment operations. In addition to this, NRG is supposed to offer additional benefits:
- As the backbone of the reward system found with Energi, NRG should be a more environmentally friendly option compared to similar models of other cryptos. Its masternode staking is described as less computationally demanding than the competing mining-based models, such as that found with Bitcoin, for example. NRG is also billed as being specifically engineered to reduce carbon footprint, as well as to need less computational power due to its early lifecycle stage and smaller block sizes.
- NRG is also promoted as a potential solution for locations which are faced with hyperinflation. This is based on the plan to gradually reduce its emission rates over time. Also, NRG is dedicated to keeping transaction costs low and offering performance levels which are resistant to speed reductions related to increased transaction volumes. All of this should make paying with NRG a competent substitute to making payments with debit or credit cards.
- The use of NRG should eliminate the supposed decentralization dilemma faced by the likes of Ethereum and Bitcoin. Since the use of its Treasury is decided by voting which is carried out by select members, there should be no need for protracted decision-making processes, such as in the case of other decentralized cryptos. Instead, a platform’s dedicated DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) would have the final say when it comes to spending NRG.
NRG Token Availability
As of August 2019, NRG’s market cap value stood at some USD 123 million, down from its peak of more than USD 160 million in July 2019. At the same time, some 19 million NRG tokens were found in circulation.
In addition to earning tokens as platform-based rewards, one can acquire them on cryptocurrency exchanges which include KuCoin, Digifinex and others.
Once acquired, the NRG tokens can be stored in the official Core Wallet which is also used for staking purposes. Energi is also available on the Coinomi wallet app for iPhone and Android.