Steve Wozniak’s energy-efficiency startup Efforce began its life in 2019 but did not go public until December 2020. The private sale of the project’s token WOZX raised $18 million for the startup. Upon the WOZX exchange listing in December 2020, the Efforce was valued at $80 million and reached a market cap of $950 million in 13 minutes subsequently to the WOZX public trading launch.
What Is Efforce About?
The project’s stated goal is to create an energy-saving public marketplace. In it, investors will be able to invest in energy-efficiency projects by buying WOZX tokens, which represent future energy savings in the form of security.
There will be two primary actors in the Efforce marketplace: contributors and projects. Contributors will be investing in WOZX, which represents future energy savings and financing energy efficiency projects. The projects will be using the funds to realise their energy-saving technologies. In return, investors will receive the energy savings tokenized in WOZX.
The energy efficiency market has always been a highly regulated place not accessible to retail and non-professional investors. On the other end, it has always been hard for small companies to acquire the necessary funding for growing their businesses in the energy-saving market. The gateways have been kept by energy giants and the access to funds has been jeopardized by multiple bureaucratic barriers.
The Efforce marketplace aims to democratize the energy efficiency market and make it accessible to both energy efficiency startups and non-professional investors. The marketplace will have no central control.
How It Works?
Tokenization will be a key conceptual component in the mechanism of the Efforce marketplace. The WOZX token will tokenize future energy savings that will be the underlying asset of the token. When a contributor buys WOZX, they will be contributing their funds to particular projects that will be listed on the marketplace.
To get a listing on Efforce, the projects will need to file an application. After that, the Efforce listing team will validate the project before listing it or not. Every listed project will have a description that will include key parameters necessary to estimate the project’s future energy savings and its profitability for contributors. Those parameters will be inputted in Energy Performance Contracts (EPC) that will estimate future returns for the project and its investors. Every such contract will be running on the Efforce blockchain.
Further on, EPCs will be providing investors with information about the projects’ performance throughout the investment return period, comparing those data against the initial estimates, and distributing the payouts to contributors. In addition to concrete investment returns, 1% of all profits generated by all energy-efficiency projects listed on Efforce will be evenly distributed across all 1 billion WOZX, making it more liquid.
Conclusion
It remains to be seen how successful this blockchain venture should be in delivering its bold stated goals. Presently, Steve Wozniak and his partners have at least drawn rather massive attention to their daring venture at the junction of blockchain and green tech. Despite all the publicity already received by Steve Wozniak’s novel undertaking, we still shall see whether Efforce will grow to some makeshift company that will make a real change in the energy market comparable to how Apple products have changed their own markets.
The content of this article is for informational purposes only and should not be construed as investment advice. We ask you to do your research.
