# Trade wholesale power and gas without a central platform

> Hamburg-based PONTON GmbH operates Enerchain, a decentralised order book that lets European energy trading houses close power and gas deals directly with each other. More than 40 trading companies, among them Enel and RWE, took part in the trial, and 23 utilities each contributed EUR 20,000 to fund final development. The underlying WRMHL framework achieves a block time of under one second and an average consensus time of around 200 milliseconds.

**Sector:** Tertiary sector · **Industry:** Energy utilities · **Organisation:** PONTON GmbH · **Maturity level:** Production

Canonical URL: https://www.sapientblock.com/en/use-cases/ponton-strom-gasgrosshandel-zentrale-handelsplattform-abwickeln

## Documentation status

- **Project status:** Unknown
- **Evidence:** Evidence medium
- **Editorial review:** pending

## Description

Hamburg-based PONTON GmbH has built a decentralized order book for the European electricity and gas wholesale market with Enerchain, involving over 40 trading companies. Until now, transactions in over-the-counter energy trading have been conducted via brokers and exchanges, which incur fees and make participants dependent on central operators. Through the distributed ledger, traders send anonymous orders directly to other participants and conclude deals without intermediaries.

The first European energy trade via blockchain was conducted in October 2016 at the EMART conference in Amsterdam; from May 2017 a proof-of-concept phase followed with 44 European energy trading companies. The technical basis is the WRMHL framework developed by PONTON, which supports a decentralized order book and achieves trading-suitable latencies with a block time of under one second and an average consensus duration of around 200 milliseconds. Traders send anonymous orders into the distributed order book, which all other participants can view, and then conclude bilateral deals without an exchange or broker in between. For the final development, 23 utilities each contributed 20,000 euros, and companies such as Enel and RWE started live trading after the test phase. The approach demonstrates that a distributed ledger can meet the latency requirements of a real trading market, which was long considered a disqualifying factor. Later, PONTON shifted the project focus to Enerchain Local for energy communities, which is why the current operational status of the wholesale platform is not clearly evident from audited sources.

## Benefits

- Lower transaction costs in over-the-counter energy wholesale trading.
- Less dependence on individual trading venue operators.
- Bilateral contracts are possible without broker or exchange fees.
- Participants remain anonymous when placing orders and trade directly with each other.
- With a consensus duration of around 200 milliseconds, the ledger achieves latencies suitable for trading.
- Governance lies with the market participants themselves rather than a central platform operator.
- Direct settlement path without intermediaries shortens subsequent reconciliation.
- New areas of expertise in operating distributed trading infrastructure.

## Challenges

- Without a central trading venue, counterparty risks must be secured bilaterally.
- A decentralized order book only works if enough trading houses participate and liquidity is generated.
- The current operational status of the wholesale platform is not clearly verifiable from audited sources.
- Connecting to participants' existing trading and risk systems causes significant integration effort.

## Technology foundation

Enerchain runs on the WRMHL framework developed by PONTON, which supports a decentralized order book as a distributed ledger and achieves a block time of under one second as well as an average end-to-end consensus duration of around 200 milliseconds. This latency is a prerequisite for a distributed ledger to be considered for energy trading at all, because otherwise orders become outdated faster than they can be confirmed.

## Sources

- [Enerchain](https://www.ponton.de/enerchain)
- [Enerchain P2P Trading Project](https://enerchain.ponton.de/index.php/21-enerchain-p2p-trading-project)
- [First European energy trade over the blockchain](https://enerchain.ponton.de/index.php/11-first-european-energy-trade-over-the-blockchain)
- [Europe's biggest utilities join Blockchain Energy Trading trial](https://gulfnews.com/your-money/cryptocurrency/europes-biggest-utilities-join-blockchain-energy-trading-trial-1.2034880)