We’re 5!

This will mark the 5th anniversary of SolarCoin’s low-carbon blockchain launch (with 99.99% uptime); in cryptocurrency dog years that makes us about 100 years old.

Our 40 year goal is to incentivize global solar energy, to date we have distributed 12 million SolarCoin to further this mission. SolarCoin is now distributed in 73 countries to over 4,000 installations, with an estimated economic network of 3,500–4,500 nodes.

SolarCoin’s small network and the volatile backdrop of crypto has resulted in some wild swings: the Solarcoin price has ranged from $2.20 to $0.02 USD in 2018.

Supply side

SolarCoin circulation went from §38.45m to §49.71m, a 29.2% annual inflation rate in 2018. Staking contributed only a small amount to this, less than our 2% targeted inflation rate due to partial stake participation.

Demand side

A few factors are at play. As we continue to enroll new users into the program, each new group that grows the network is estimated to have a certain value (see research paper below). Our operating model can be viewed as basically buying a network of users by granting SolarCoin, a long term 20–30 year global solar energy airdrop.
Dropouts and breakage

For various reasons network participants may drop out or lose interest. Our guess is that some of our economies’ speculative participants dropped out this year.

It is difficult to calculate how many private keys and wallets get lost, but users of cryptocurrencies are known to lose their private keys (and access to their funds). When this occurs, the associated SolarCoin are effectively taken out of circulation. While we do not have an estimate for SolarCoin, it is estimated a 5–20% of Bitcoin is out of circulation due to lost private keys.

SolarCoin Economic Theory

Our economic theory on currency value has now been drafted and the initial version published. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3281845

The summary is that for most world currencies, bitcoin and gold, each user supports roughly $1,000-$5,000 USD in value on a GDP adjusted basis. Users are broadly defined as individuals or entities willing to hold, accept or trade a currency protocol.

The research indicates that if 1m solar installations signed up, the price of SolarCoin would be roughly $7.00–31.00; this is well in line with the originally stated goal of $10.00–20.00 USD for the project to be a useful marginal incentive.

Needless to say, there is a long way to go. The good news: the research shows Metcalf’s law is violated and that the currency protocol network effect kicks in at low levels, so even a hundred thousand users may be very interesting for SolarCoin. Please do your own analysis. This isn’t a buy or sell recommendation, it’s an end of year holiday note.
2018 goals

We fell short.

• Our scaling efforts via affiliates and platforms took longer than anticipated. We had estimated growth in users based on affiliate sign-ups to be significantly higher.
• We have 30 affiliates with a few engaged and using the API to submit data but not the scale of uptake anticipated or required for our long term goals.
• As it stands our community is still estimated at 3,500–4,500. For context all of the smart contract platforms combined have 60k daily users stateofthedapps.com and likely a few million in total with bitcoin having an estimated 20–30m users.
• We should have deployed our automated data import, Project X-Ray, much sooner in 2018. We’re seeing strong interest, and the tool allows us to quickly onboard users and engage with the platform providers directly.

2019 goals

We want to go big. There. We said it. We roll out our partnership with SMA’s Sunny Portal early in 2019. This puts SolarCoin in front 25 GW of installed capacity and 300,000 potential user installations: roughly 5% of global solar energy. Our goal for 2019 is to get SolarCoin in front of 10% of global installed solar with a high percentage signing up for the program.

We are currently in talks with platforms that have 900,000 additional users and even more in the pipeline. Our efforts are now focused on direct partnerships with monitoring platforms and utilities.

We are chasing huge growth, and we need your help — the more demand solar monitoring platforms and utilities see from their users, the more likely they are to enroll their users. Tell your utility or monitoring platform that SolarCoin is a great free rewards program, or put us in touch and we’ll do the heavy lifting.

Thanks to our community

We have a strong and involved community with 2,000 users in Slack, 7,000 Twitter followers and over 2,000 Facebook fans. You are passionate about solar energy and transforming how the world generates power. We cannot achieve this without you. Thank you.

All the best for 2019,

The SolarCoin team