But now companies are moving beyond trials to commercial projects, leveraging the distributed ledger technology for payments and trading on a city-wide and even national scale.

“What the internet did for communications, blockchain will do for trusted transactions, and the energy and utilities industry is no exception,” said Stephen Callahan, vice president of energy, environment and utilities for global strategy at IBM.

The trend illustrates how blockchain is swiftly moving beyond financial services and cryptocurrencies, and offers a glimpse of a growing challenge to the $2tr energy market.

Blockchain is a database of transactions distributed among multiple computers. It solves two key problems in the online world: transacting without the need of a trusted intermediary, and making sure those transactions can’t later be altered, removed or reversed.

This appeals to the energy industry in several ways. As the market liberalizes and renewable energy grows, blockchain offers a way to better handle the increasingly complex and decentralized transactions between users, large- and small-scale producers, retailers and even traders and utilities.

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