A blockchain based EV charging platform initiated by Lumena
The goals of the project is to develop and deploy an infrastructure dedicated to the supervision of charging station, strongly coupled with a micro-payment infrastructure. The technical requirements of the solution are the following :
- It must be very secure. Especially, only allowed people and computers should be able to interact with charging stations. Payments must fulfill latests security constraints especially regarding DSP2.
- It must be as cheap as possible to operate. The challenge is to meet the security requirements without having additonal costs or having to rely on external third-party.
- It must be easy to deploy.
- It must be easily extensible. Other parties should be able to join the networks without compromising the security of the infrastructure.
Taking into account the above-mentioned constraints, we have chosen to base our solution on blockchain technology, for the following reasons :
- It is secure by design and quasi impossible to hack if carefully used and implemented.
- It allows strong authentication through the use of wallets
- It allows secured delivery versus payment. Each payment can be related to a dedicated delivery of service and the proofs of the delivery can be stored in case of dispute.
- The trustless nature of the technology allows adding new network participants without compromising the security of other participants.
- The deployment can be easy and secured if each charging station is also a network node.
The reasons why we chose Substrate/Polkadot are :
- By having nodes with a dedicated purpose, we will be able to optimise the footprint of the node in order to deploy it to charging stations, that have limited available resources
- We can choose the most suitable consensus mechanism and especially combine POA on the parachain with PoS on the relay chain.
- We have the flexibility to chose between multiple target topologies. E.g. one parachain for all energy providers on the platform, or one parachain by energy provider.
- The composability of the FRAME architecture allows us to reuse existing pallets (e.g. identity, membership, contracts, ...) while being able to add our own specific pallets.
- Since we have connections to multiple interfaces (payments, charging power, mobile apps) the offchain features of Substrate will alllow us to handle the connection with external sources in both directions in a secure manner.
The following schema describes the overall architecture of the project.
We don't know any similar projects. The fact that charging stations themselves will be blockchain nodes is a real innovation. We are currently speaking with DBT and they are interested in working with us. If first phases are successful, we will very probably create a spinoff with them.
- Fabrice CROISEAUX
- Michel ONFRAY
- Antoine DETANTE
- Franck LEGARDEUR
- Contact Name: Fabrice CROISEAUX
- Contact Email: [email protected]
- Website: https://www.lumena.tech
- Registered Address: 2 rue Maurice Barrès, 57000 METZ FR
- Registered Legal Entity: Lumena
If this phase is successful, we will create a company dedicated to the development, marketing and selling of the solution. First step will be to find investors (coming from industry or VCs). Future developments will include :
- The ability to automatically detect who is trying to charge his EV, based on the location of the station and on the location of users, choosing the closest user.
- A fully working production ready mobile app with an embedded wallet to identify and authenticate users, being compliant with RDPG and ideally EIDAS for signature. Being EIDAS compliant will probably not be possible at short term because the current regulation doesn't take into account blockchain specificities. We will nevertheless integrate concepts described in the following document : SSI eIDAS Legal Report. How eIDAS can legally support digital identity and trustworthy DLT-based transactions in the Digital Single Market
- A payment module that will be compliant with DSP2. Our goal is to develop a reusable module that interact with banks to prove that the acount owner has given his consent to initiate payment from his account. Here we can leverage the security of the blockchain to comply with PISP constraints. Opportunities are well described here.
- Capability to add innovative possibilities via Ink! Smart Contracts. e.g. variable pricing depending on the load of the energy network, pricing could be determined by consensus, charging session reservations, etc...
We are convinced that this project has a huge potential to solve the majority of problems or paint points that EV users are facing regarding charging their vehicule. This is typically a domain where blockchain technology is the ideal technology by allowing the secure digitalisation of assets (charging power, money and identity) and the secure conversion of value between these assets. Our potential partnership with DBT will give us a direct access to the market.