2026-11-05 –, Lightning Stage
Smart meters, solar panels and home appliances produce data every day, yet it sits with utilities and platforms that decide who uses it and at what price, and keep most of the value. This work-in-progress talk asks when Ethereum lets citizens keep ownership of the data their homes create and earn from it directly, by taking pricing, access and governance rules out of an operator's discretion, and when a centralised platform may still do better.
Smart meters, solar panels and appliances generate data in every home. That data sits with a utility or platform operator, which decides who may use it, sets the price and can change the rules later. The household that produced it sees little of the value. This project takes the opposite view: citizens and energy communities own the data their homes create and earn from it when a grid operator, municipality or developer uses it.
Tokenisation alone does not deliver this. In a Horizon Europe project I worked on, licences were tokens on a permissioned chain, yet the operator kept control over upgrades, token minting, custody and fees, so producers who had invested in metering and onboarding still faced hold-up.
The fellowship compares three regimes: a centralised platform, a blockchain market with operator discretion, and credibly committed rules on Ethereum, using transaction-cost economics and incomplete-contract theory to show when commitment benefits producers, and at what cost.
Silvio Meneguzzo is a research fellow at the University of Turin and a postdoctoral researcher at Fondazione LINKS. He completed a PhD in blockchain and distributed ledger technologies in 2026 and is part of the 2026 cohort of the Ethereum Foundation PhD Fellowship. He worked on the token-based marketplace of a Horizon Europe energy data-space project; his current research asks when credibly committed rules on Ethereum give data producers a better deal than a centralised platform.