Blockchain startup LO3 Energy has scored a partnership with the European Power Exchange, known as EPEX SPOT, to link local electric microgrids to broader wholesale markets.

EPEX SPOT is a power trading company based in France and covering Germany, the U.K., the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland and Luxembourg. It allows users in each country to buy or sell excess power to each other.

In many ways, the options for companies and investors are currently very limited; it is currently in a similar situation as the media industry was before the rise of freelancing sites like Elance or Upwork. There is no way to easily link up small private investors with growing companies, there is a lot of legal hurdles to running an IPO, and there are startup costs to be reckoned with.

U.S. President Donald Trump has signed a $700 billion military spending bill that includes a mandate for a blockchain cybersecurity research study.

As CoinDesk reported in September, the bill – as advanced by the U.S. Senate at the time – called for the Department of Defense to investigate "potential offensive and defensive cyber applications of blockchain technology and other distributed database technologies."

Steve Chen, founder of EchoLink, a credentials-verification Blockchain project, has been appointed industry co-lead of the new Berkeley Blockchain Lab, a platform for students to gain real-world experience working with Blockchain technology. Chen came up with the idea behind EchoLink while serving as the founding engineering director at a NYSE mobile technology company, where he saw the opportunity to create efficiency and value by storing data around engineering graduates’ degrees on the Blockchain.

UC Berkeley is an ideal first pilot educational institution because of its active student Blockchain enthusiast community. The student leaders of Blockchain at Berkeley come from diverse professional experiences including serving as analysts of investment banks and software engineers at local tech startups.

Follow me @farazsheikh