Leading producer and supplier of electricity in France and Europe, EDF, has partnered with Ethereum DApp iExec to test Ethereum-based solutions. With more and more companies showing interest in Ethereum and DApps, the price of Ethereum has gone up.
What is EDF?
EDF is the world’s fifth biggest electrical utility company, owned in its largest part by the French state. The company reported €71.2 billion in revenues in 2016 and has a $36 billion market cap. EDF produces, transmits, distributes, imports and exports electricity. By using nuclear power, coal and gas, EDF provides electricity for French energy consumers.
Coindesk report
According to Coindesk’s report, EDF launched its visual simulator software GPUSPH on Ethereum DApp iExec to test how it will work on a blockchain rather than a normal computing environment. GPUSPH is “a fully three-dimensional model for the simulation of the thermal and rheological evolution of lava flows that relies on the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) numerical method.”
The simulator can be used to study water dams and the process of lava cooling. EDF wants to examine whether Ethereum will improve GPUSPH’s performance. iExec is a decentralized application that operates on Ethereum mainnet. This allows iExec to build “a virtual Cloud infrastructure that provides high-performance computing services on demand.” According to iExec’s whitepaper, the company offers decentralized applications running on the Ethereum blockchain a secure access to the services and computing resources they need.
Speaking to CoinDesk, EDF blockchain engineer Gilles Deleuze, said:
“In a wider perspective, … development of distributed computing is a credible scenario for the future, and blockchain may be a nice lever in this scenario. So, let’s explore it.”
Deleuze added that EDF aims to add other experiments on iExec in the future: “The plan is to continue with other open scientific codes requiring possibly other types of workerpools.”
Jean-Charles Cabelguen, iExec head of innovation and adoption, noted the iExec application is powerful enough and does not impact on Ethereum: “The heavy computing is done off-chain and does not overwhelm ethereum. Afterward, blockchain is used to reach a consensus on the validity of computation’s results. A hash of this result is stored on the blockchain.”
Ethereum blockchain and ETH on the spotlight
EDF is only one of the companies that is showing interest in Ethereum and Dapps, something that has helped to increase Ethereum financial transactions and gas transactions. In terms of the price of ETH, Ethereum is on the spotlight, after a positive performance. According to Ethereum World News, Ethereum is back in the game and its “usability has exploded beyond the economic dimension, reaching a record of daily transactions never seen in the whole year.”
But there is also a noticeable increase in DApps and smart contracts which demonstrate that Ethereum has more use cases too. Ethereum World News reported that the total daily Gas used on the Ethereum network exceeded 45 billion Gas, “with almost 50 Billion by May 7, 2018. This represents 133% compared to February.” This shows that “the public is using more DApps and Smart contracts that require higher consumption because of their complexity.”
DApps have been criticized recently as Bitcoin developer Jimmy Song said, during the Consensus 2019 conference, that “The only reason Dapps exist is to raise money from gullible people or from greedy FOMO people, and that’s essentially what the Ethereum platform has done.” On the other hand, Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin argued against Song and claimed that DApps will do well five years from now. A bet of around $500,000 was made on the future of Ethereum.
As Coindesk said: “If Ethereum is doing great four years from now, Song will pay Lubin (or his beneficiary) 810.8 ETH. If the Dapp economy is sputtering at that point, Lubin will send Song 69.74 BTC. For Lubin to win, Ethereum needs to have 15 unique Dapps achieving 10,000 or more daily active users and 100,000 monthly active users for any six calendar months in any 12-calendar-month period up to and including May 23, 2023.”