Case study: Powerledger strengthens its platform to reach one billion users

Blockchain-enabled energy trading platform Powerledger needed a cloud-based platform to support its continued growth.

The company aims to have 100 million smart meters on its platform in the next five years, and in the years ahead hopes to reach one billion users and achieve 24/7 carbon-free energy.

To support this goal, Powerledger needed to move to a database platform that could ingest the 20 billion records the company had produced these past six years, and add the scale to cater to the 1 billion users it aims to serve in the future.

Dr Vivek Bhandari, CTO at Powerledger told Digital Nation the company went through many proof of concepts with various platforms but ultimately settled on MongoDB for both technical and non-technical reasons.

“The technical reasons are more related to quickly be able to scale and handle large volume of data, technical reasons being the development team like to try out new technologies that can do better things,” he said.

“But then there's other software business reasons where we have a very close collaboration compared to others in the market. We do things together and there is a business relationship that is very strong.”

Implementing MongoDB last year, one of the benefits Bhandari has seen from the platform is it’s able to withstand large amounts of data.

“We’ve seen cases where we did big load tests, as I understand all the alarms in MongoDB centres started blinking because we were doing really big load tests. We also created some trouble, but the redundancy, as an example, was so great that we didn't see any difference,” he explained.

“It's easy to use, it's scalable, so all these factors make sense, especially in our case where we are talking ultimately to reach effect billion lives.”

With this new platform, Bhandari said it will enable Powerledger to scale and build new products.

“Now, the team is more used to it than they were one and a half years ago. It automatically comes in their minds to use it,” he said.

“We will be building a lot of potential new products that will use it. We also have some migration work from some of our products this plan.”