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Steve Ehrlich
Welcome to another episode of Fits and the Interview. My name is Steve Ehrlich, Head of Research at Sharplink and also your host. We've got a terrific show for you today, but before we dive in, let's take a very brief break to hear from some of the sponsors who make the show possible.
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Steve Ehrlich
all right, welcome back. So like I said, we've got a really interesting and timely episode today. I have with me Sean Murray, the head of special projects and crypto lead at Fuse Energy, a $5 billion UK based energy company. Full stack energy company that that really sits at, I guess, the convergence of decentralized infrastructure, crypto and energy. And we've been speaking for weeks now about how crypto and macro are colliding. That's what we do on the show in particular in relation to the volatility in energy prices. And Sean's business is being directly impacted by all of this and they've come up with a really ingenious way to try to, I guess, mute out some of that volatility and grow a sustainable business that's largely based on renewable energy. Something that we can all get behind.
Sean Murray
So welcome Sean, thanks for having me on.
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
Steve. Great to be here.
Steve Ehrlich
So I want to just level set here and I want to make sure that we're going to get into all those issues. But Fuse It's a bit of a complicated company and like many projects that I highlight on the show, your origins did not start in crypto. The firm actually was created by a few early employees of Revolut Europe's I believe, largest or most valuable fintech startup. So they know how to grow a business and you've already built a pretty successful company before you even got into crypto. So just very briefly, can you please explain what Fuse does?
Sean Murray
Yeah, sure Steve, and thanks. And understandable. We're building probably about 10 different businesses
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
at once right now.
Sean Murray
So a lot going on. But in summary, we're a verticalized energy company. So it means we operate across the energy stack. Everything from generating energy from our own generation plants like solar and wind farms that we acquire and manage to a big in house kind of trading operation on wholesale power markets to then ultimately supplying homes and soon businesses with energy
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
and billing them every month for it.
Sean Murray
And that's kind of on top of kind of an installation and an R
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
and D unit as well that we do for kind of distributed energy devices that ultimately looking to launch our kind of crypto native product into.
Sean Murray
So that's broadly what we're doing. We're doing about half a billion in revenue right now annually, mostly based in Europe and the uk, but looking to
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
kind of expand over the next year or two to, you know, North America and a bunch of other countries.
Steve Ehrlich
Yeah, and I know one, I guess, big feather in your cap is a no action letter you got from the sec, I believe last year. And we'll get into that and what it means for your business. But first I really want to talk about what's happening in energy markets today. I don't have to tell anyone listening or watching that they're volatile. Oil is still about above $100. And given I think some of the seesawing statements from President Trump in the US and responses from the Iranians, it's very unclear what's going to happen next. How is this impacting the energy markets in Europe versus the US Which I believe is a little more self reliant. And what are some of the big changes or how is this impacting your business?
Sean Murray
Yeah, a great, very obviously topical question and the kind of differences between the
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
UK and Europe and the US are
Sean Murray
pretty stark, which you can kind of see manifest itself on the charts right now. I think one of the big things that we look at broadly is if you think about kind of oil and gas prices, obviously they're incredibly. The price of oil and gas on
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
markets is incredibly related to the supply.
Sean Murray
And you know, most, most of that
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
comes through the gulf for, for Europe
Sean Murray
especially in the U.S. naturally, you know, with the kind of recent shale revolution
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
the US is, is somewhat self sufficient especially when it comes to, to, to gas.
Sean Murray
But I think you know, one of the big things that we look at is when we're looking at and how it's kind of affecting our business is that the price of oil actually doesn't really affect, you know, the price that ultimately people pay for their energy.
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
That homes, businesses, data centers, et cetera pay for their energy.
Sean Murray
That and you know, obviously it affects what people pay at the pump but it's, it's more through secondary effects that oil has these knock on effects on the kind of energy economy and, and you know, it's loosely correlated with gas and that's typically due to you know,
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
it's kind of a replacement in some industrial applications. And obviously oil and gas are sourced near one another.
Sean Murray
But the main effect of oil on kind of power markets and energy markets
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
in general is secondary due to you know, inflationary effects on, on logistics.
Sean Murray
And obviously that's been hugely impacted with
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
the recent developments in the Middle East.
Sean Murray
The kind of more kind of pertinent thing around energy markets for us in
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
our business is the price of gas.
Sean Murray
And it's a totally different story because
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
gas directly influences the price of electricity that people pay.
Sean Murray
It's the kind of primary fuel that
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
goes into your combine gas turbines which
Sean Murray
makes up a third of the fuel mix in both the UK and the US and the way that energy markets
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
are structured and the kind of price discovery mechanism on energy markets is very heavily indexed towards the gas price.
Sean Murray
So what that means is when there's supply disruptions to the LNG around the world, what you see is a direct
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
impact immediately almost on the price on power markets.
Sean Murray
And in terms of the kind of US vs Europe UK comparison the Europe is very, is a heavy importer of gas. And typically what happens is that you have seasons where there's injections into gas storage facilities that typically happens over the summer and then you've got seasons of
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
withdrawal from those storage facilities.
Sean Murray
And obviously naturally during the injection season which is now coming up, the price worldwide of gas heavily influences ultimately the
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
costs Europe is paying.
Sean Murray
On the flip side, US is with
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
the recent shale revolution, fairly insulated as we've kind of seen a little bit on, on the gas side of things.
Sean Murray
And that is going to be something to watch over the next few years though. And the reason for that is when you look at there There's a certain decoupling between the Henry Hub price, which
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
is the price, the, the kind of standard price of gas in the uk, the us, and the kind of the, the price of gtf, which is the kind of European UK index.
Sean Murray
Those are somewhat decoupled because you, the us, because it's such a recent market, is slowly still ramping up its export capacity, which means that right now there's this decoupling. But we do expect that decoupling to
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
actually decrease over time.
Sean Murray
And the kind of consequence of that is right now there's quite a, quite a lot of insulation for the US market, but not at all for the, for the UK market. But that decoupling, you know, as I
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
kind of said, we'll look to converge
Sean Murray
over time, but yeah, ultimately when it comes down to our business, it's the
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
price of gas and the flows and
Sean Murray
the kind of status of the storage
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
facilities around Europe, because that's where we're
Sean Murray
operating right now is what really influences what we're paying and then ultimately what
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
customers are paying down the line.
Steve Ehrlich
Gotcha. And maybe just to sort of again, frame a picture for everyone watching and listening, $100 a barrel for oil sounds moderately scary. 150 is very worrisome. $200 is downright terrifying. And that could lead us into stagflation territory. Could you sort of put natural gas prices in those terms? And I know, I mean, just, I'm not an energy expert, but it's easy to remember, especially during the Russian invasion of Ukraine from 2022 on, sanctions put on Russian energy exports. And nowadays people are talking about the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. And while some oil processing plants have been shut down and it might take months for them to start up, if and when this conflict ends, the Strait could reopen immediately, theoretically. Whereas Iran's attack on Qatar's big processing and export facility, I believe knocked off 20% of its total capacity. And Qatar is a huge LNG exporter. That could have much more permanent effects from what I could tell. So how does that. Like, again, quite a kind of long question, but like, what are the prices right now and how is that actually directly impacting customers? And then again, like, because of this, like, big attack on the infrastructure, what challenges will that present moving into the future?
Sean Murray
Yeah, so I mean, right now the, the price of gas are basically about 50% above 50 to 70% above the kind of usual price that was kind
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
of, we would expect around this, this kind of year.
Sean Murray
And you know, ultimately that is down to you know, the obviously the disruption
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
to the straight of Hormuz and you
Sean Murray
know, when we kind of look at it like beyond just crude and lng, you've got like disruption further to and you know, not just gas prices but a bunch of other prices as well.
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
Right.
Sean Murray
So for instance, 30%, 34% of global fertilizers come through the strait. Right. There's also effects, so that's ultimately affects food and then also you know, kerosene is mostly sourced out of Qatar and strait as well.
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
So that obviously influences the price we pay for jet fuel.
Sean Murray
And further effects on that is like there's about a quarter of the world's sulfuric acid comes through the Gulf that is needed for things like explosives, which is obviously very hot and topical right now. And also, you know, we're finding things
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
like copper which is essential input to many things including a lot of inputs in the energy industry.
Sean Murray
So as a consequence essentially right now what we're looking at is gas prices are you know, quite like fairly elevated, probably not as aggressively elevated as what we've seen with, with, with oil and not quite as aggressively elevated as what
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
we've seen through the Russia Ukraine crisis.
Sean Murray
And that is in part because you know, especially in Europe there's been a lot of measures taken since the 2021 crisis to kind of, you know, obviously mitigate the, the serious effects that that crisis had and causing you know, kind
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
of the, the disruption to the energy markets back, back in 2021.
Sean Murray
And and so that said, like essentially what we're seeing is right now we've seen an increase, but not as aggressive
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
as what we've seen in the past.
Sean Murray
But however, one of the big issues that you know, that probably a lot of our listeners have seen is that you know, this, this disruption and this
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
attack on the facilities themselves, these are multi billion dollar facilities that take decades to build and a very long time to repair pair.
Sean Murray
So the, the, the, the long term
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
disruption is something that I feel like
Sean Murray
isn't fully being factored in right now. And people, you know, view that okay look, this is a short term thing, we'll see a taco and then you know, prices will return to normal. But in fact, you know, what we, what we're not really recognizing, what I
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
kind of think that you know, a lot of markets aren't really recognizing is
Sean Murray
that there are these really severe long
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
term effects on global cost that they're going to percolate and last for quite a few years.
Steve Ehrlich
And I think that probably leads me into my next good question. Which is again, you guys are, I think like, I think you described yourselves as a full stack power plant or a full stack power company. You do help generate for your customers renewables, but you're also from what I can tell, a wholesale energy purchaser and supplier. So you sell LNG and that type of fuel enter or you sell electricity generated from like those types of sources to your, to your customers as well. How are you, how are you hedging prices in this particular environment? Especially given what you just said that you think, you think people are sort of underestimating the longer term impact. And I'm also, this is all also happening right in the middle of an explosion in, in prediction markets where I mean oil derivative contracts on places like Hyper Liquid are, are seeing massive volume to the extent that the second biggest markets outside of Bitcoin. So like what are you seeing? How are, are, are you hedging? Especially in a world where while maybe it's ideal at some point to generate almost all of your energy from renewables, that's not really practical at this point.
Sean Murray
Yeah, of course, yeah, a couple of things there. So I guess first maybe just to give like a quick little bit of background on like the, the, the structure and the price discovery mechanism in, in, in power markets. So, and even if you're, even if your fuel mix or what you use
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
to generate your power in a given region or country is like let's say
Sean Murray
predominantly renewables, in most competitive markets actually the price of gas ends up setting
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
the, the, the, the price that everybody pays for, for energy.
Sean Murray
And the reason is essentially demand is fairly fixed. So let's say Steve, you and I
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
are buying power for an hour tomorrow starting at noon.
Sean Murray
The, the, the demand for power in that hour is fairly inelastic, which is
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
actually a big issue that we're looking to solve.
Sean Murray
And what happens is you, you have, your generators will bid in and, and those bids will be price ranked. And essentially the most expensive bid that
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
meets what the demand requirement is sets the price across the market.
Sean Murray
So even if renewables make up 90%
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
of your kind of generation mix, often
Sean Murray
it is the price of gas, the gas that fills the gaps and it
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
is the price of gas that then sets the market wide price.
Sean Murray
So often when we're thinking about hedging and looking forward, we are looking at, you know, actually okay, there's going to be, there's actually extreme sensitivity in power
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
markets to the price of gas.
Sean Murray
Even when you look at a cost
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
basis, gas actually doesn't make up a large cost to produce the energy in the first place, which is, you know,
Sean Murray
can have a separate debate on like if that's the right market structure or not. But so when we're thinking about this, we're thinking about our kind of trading operations and generally we, we operate a
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
very neutral long or like slightly long desk.
Sean Murray
And our kind of trading operation has
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
a modus operandi of de risking.
Sean Murray
So how it works essentially is we have, for a given day in the future you have a certain amount of demand and our delivery obligation is actually
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
unknown, I suppose, or forecasted, unlike maybe.
Sean Murray
And that's kind of a difference to
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
energy markets and maybe traditional, you're a
Steve Ehrlich
growing company as opposed to a mature utility that like.
Sean Murray
Yeah, exactly. And then also you don't actually know how much people are going to use. When you're looking at, you know, like if you ask me how much energy, you know, my customer base is going
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
to use in three months time, I can only give you an estimate of
Sean Murray
that because it's highly dependent mostly on temperature, which you can't, you know, you
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
cannot forecast that far in advance.
Sean Murray
So what happens is we essentially buy these kind of fairly like flat blocks and we kind of DCA into those
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
over a couple of months and we
Sean Murray
slowly build out the box to essentially what we think the kind of customer
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
demand profile is going to be.
Sean Murray
It's generally bimodal. You've got a peak in the morning and a peak in the evening when people are home.
Steve Ehrlich
I'm sorry, just to interrupt. When you're buying these blocks, you're buying these from energy producers, you're buying them from.
Sean Murray
Yeah. Generally on power exchanges.
Steve Ehrlich
Power exchanges. Okay.
Sean Murray
Yeah. So essentially you're kind of like slowly essentially hedging out your exposure to that
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
demand profile that you've forecasted.
Sean Murray
And then what happens is when you get, and essentially what we do is we look to kind of closed with
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
a flat, a fairly flat block buck every day.
Sean Murray
And that's, you know, more so especially
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
in the current environment.
Sean Murray
And then what happens is, you know, kind of day ahead when you have a lot more information about, you know,
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
the, the particular shape of what your customer's kind of demand profile is going to be and the energy that you need to provide them.
Sean Murray
You buy more refined blocks then. So you buy the kind of arrow
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
blocks that you use to kind of shape out the demand, which is very temperature dependent.
Steve Ehrlich
That's interesting. So you're, so you're buying these on almost like an hourly or daily time horizon. You're not.
Sean Murray
Daily time horizon.
Steve Ehrlich
Kind of like a Farmer who's, who's, who's selling a futures contract six months out so that you can kind of guarantee a price for your harvest. This is much more short term duration. How much more expensive is it to I guess hedge exposure to engage in this type of, engage in these activities given the heightened volatility for you?
Sean Murray
So it is, yeah, right now it's much more expensive. And typically what happens is that what if you're like hedging on under a kind of, you know, fairly market standard approach, typically any of the kind of customer, you know, price protections and stuff will reflect that by the time you
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
actually get to delivery.
Sean Murray
So you're not going to have breaking
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
regulations around, you know, pricing your energy too high.
Sean Murray
But you know, one of the other things we kind of love to do then is we look to kind of buy essentially a couple of other products that hedge our exposure to further increases
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
in generally volume and price.
Sean Murray
So that's kind of like our exposure kind of varies quite non linearly with both temperature, which affects both price and demand.
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
Right.
Sean Murray
And so typically you build out these kind of hedging blocks and then you shape them as you get closer to delivery. And then for specific either macro events or cold snaps or that kind of thing, we'll buy kind of more sophisticated kind of options or temperature dependent swaptions that essentially allow us to ramp up or ramp down exposure depending on the
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
conditions at the time.
Sean Murray
And I guess to your point around energy prediction markets obviously become a huge,
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
hugely relevant right now.
Sean Murray
And you know, one of the things that we're kind of interested in, you know, long term is seeing, you know, does this have, you know, institutional viability right now? The markets aren't liquid really enough. And also the kind of products that we would be looking to buy as
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
a kind of institution are quite complex.
Sean Murray
So like I kind of said, like I kind of mentioned with the kind of nonlinear effects, especially on temperature on your exposure and because it affects both the price of energy and the demand
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
that your customers are going to use.
Sean Murray
And we typically like buy these quite complex bespoke products that essentially scale up or scale down with the temperature. And then there's also, you know, kind of things like to consider like basis
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
risk between what the measured temperature is and the temperature that your customers are actually using, which is ultimately what actually affects things.
Sean Murray
And so these are the kind of issues that we're thinking about solving or would love for somebody to solve as we think about, okay, how do we
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
potentially bring more energy products on chain.
Steve Ehrlich
Yeah, it's interesting, I Mean the derivative contracts on somewhere like hyper liquid, I mean they're cash settled. I mean people are really just betting on the price. I would imagine you're actually taking physically delivered products if that, if that's what you're, you're buying.
Sean Murray
Yeah, you've got financial or physical products
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
that you can trade.
Sean Murray
And so generally like the, the products that you would see being like traded proprietarily would be financial products.
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
You're not actually expecting delivery of the, of the commodity itself.
Steve Ehrlich
Yeah, but, but, but you are. Yeah, you, yeah, you are versus hyper liquid. You're not. You're literally trying to leverage the volatility to put on a market position or something like that. And in that case temperature and those types of things don't really matter. Whereas for you, I mean you have to be able to deliver this. So you have to make sure the goods that are, that arrive are sellable. I mean it's very akin to almost like a refrigerator, a refrigerated container for produce that gets sent to a supermarket or something where you have to make sure that the products don't spoil on the way to transport. That's, I think that's kind of how I'm trying to interpret it.
Sean Murray
Yeah, it's good analogy.
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
Okay.
Steve Ehrlich
All right, so we're going to talk a lot more. We're going to get into sort of your movement into the deepin economy and the launch of a token based network. But before we do, let's take one more quick break to hear from some of the sponsors who make their show possible.
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Bits and Bips Announcement
before we continue with today's episode bits and BIPS now has its own dedicated home. We're spinning off from Unchained and launching a standalone podcast and YouTube channel focused on the Fed macro, AI and how it all collides with crypto. If you want to keep up with our weekly live streams and Macro meets Crypto breakdowns. Make sure you're following bits and bips directly. We won't start publishing until March, but getting set up now means you'll be ready on day one. You can find the new Bits and Bips channels at unchained crypto.com bitsandbips. You can also find us by searching bits and bips on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen.
Steve Ehrlich
So we're back. Actually, before we continue, I need to do a bit of quick homework I've. I forgot to do in the beginning. This episode, as all episodes are, is strictly for informational and educational purposes. Nothing that you hear is financial or investment advice. For full disclosures, please see unchain crypto.com bitsandbips and with that, we're back with Sean and really excited to talk to you because you're launching kind of a token based Deepin Network. DePin, for anyone who doesn't know, stands for decentralized physical infrastructure. It has been a buzzword throughout crypto for years. But to be perfectly frank, I'm yet to really find a project that has successfully kind of gotten that escape velocity. You guys might be a little different because you've built from, as we discussed before, a very promising and lucrative business before even getting into Deepin. So talk to me a little bit about sort of the thought process behind, behind launching this network and kind of. Yeah, I mean, how, why do you think you're going to succeed when a lot of other deep end projects have, have failed to sort of get off the launch pad.
Sean Murray
Yeah, very fair. And so I think historically there's a lot of deep end projects that are somewhat of a solution, looking in, in search of a problem and are often demand constrained. And what we've seen is, you know, we've been wanting to build something on
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
chain since day one, since you know, three, four years ago that we started this.
Sean Murray
And we've identified one problem that is really, you know, not talked about enough that persists across the energy stack no matter which layer you're building on. And that's grid capacity. So right now we've got these burging like production facilities, generation facilities, and then a lot more consumption data centers, robotics, manufacturing facilities than we really ever envisioned
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
on our kind of grid networks.
Sean Murray
Our grid networks were built 150 years ago, Edison era, never envisioned to support the loads that we're putting on it
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
in the 21st century.
Sean Murray
And that has manifest itself in quite a few issues. You're trying to build anything on the grid, be it a new generation plant Like a new wind farm or solar farm or a data center. You can have the permitting, you can have the planning, you can be ready for kind of engineering and procurement, construction. But when you ask the grid, can I plug in here and either put power in or take power out, the response from the grid is often you can't do that because we haven't got capacity for you. And often what we're seeing now is decade long delays for grid reinforcements in order to be able to plug in
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
where you want to.
Sean Murray
And that's obviously got huge downstream effects on, you know, economic progress and development
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
and also just lowering energy prices, which, or the economy in general.
Sean Murray
Then when you're looking at energy markets, you've got constrained grid capacity, which often means that sometimes you've got a lot of, let's say, renewable power in a
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
certain region, when it's particularly sunny or windy, for instance, in that region, you've got demand centers separated from that and
Sean Murray
you know, this fine capacity line that often results in not being able to move that power from where we have
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
it to where we need it.
Sean Murray
So when you're looking at kind of like the statistics from that, like we kind of estimate that over 70 billion in the last kind of five years or so worth of, you know, renewable, clean, low cost power has essentially been shedded because we can't move it across
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
the grid to where it's needed.
Sean Murray
Obviously that's got huge downstream effects on
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
the costs of energy.
Sean Murray
And then finally, obviously, you know, ultimately, who, who foots the bill for this?
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
It's ultimately consumers, people who pay energy every month.
Sean Murray
So the analogy I actually like to use is that grid networks are suffering
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
from congestion issues very similar to how
Sean Murray
legacy L1s suffered from congestion issues. You've got limited network capacity, peak demand, and as a consequence network congestion, high gas prices during those times, and ultimately it's a scalability problem. So what we're looking to fix as part of this is essentially use these demand centers and coordinate, essentially making demand
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
more elastic to grid conditions.
Sean Murray
And what that actually means, you know, in practice is we want to connect to devices that are in homes already. So these are like smart devices, like smart thermostats, EVs, chargers, batteries, solar, that kind of thing. And then programmatically have them respond in when they're using energy to the conditions
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
of network congestion on the grid.
Sean Murray
And effectively what that means is if we can leverage all of these millions
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
of devices that are already just sitting in homes, like unused right now there's
Sean Murray
gigawatts of capacity, there if we can use those to actually respond to the grid conditions in real time, we can significantly reduce congestion on the grid which has tons of knock on effects into the kind of, you know, both the energy system and the global and the kind of economy as well in terms of being able to build stuff on the grid faster, being able to build manufacturing facilities faster, having less volatility on the energy markets.
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
So it means we need less provisions
Sean Murray
for reliability which ultimately means lower costs
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
of energy for everyone so we can do things faster.
Sean Murray
So that's basically essentially the core of what the kind of energy network which
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
is the kind of deepened project that we're looking to, to release is going to do.
Sean Murray
And happy to talk about, you know, kind of our kind of further reservations about being, you know, put in the deep end category. But yeah, I'll pause there.
Steve Ehrlich
Yeah, and we're going to get into that. But I just want to ask a couple of I guess clarifying questions. One, I believe you mentioned something like these devices are holding energy that that's going unused. I just want to make sure I'm understanding that versus sort of maybe devices that when I was reading about your company to prepare for the interview is more like trying to figure out a way to increase demand during times like perhaps in the middle of the night when like cooking obviously has to be done a certain period of time, but there might be times when other things can be done where there's less demand versus like these devices having energy that they could perhaps return to the grid. I just want to clarify that. And then two, just to kind of frame reference for readers, I mean we hear about insatiable data debate demands for these new AI centers. I mean anyone in crypto and we've covered like the conversion of bitcoin miners into like AI HPC centers and, and kind of how it was a gold rush for these because they have all this infrastructure and they're already plugged into the power grid. Like they take gargantuan sums of energy you serve. I forget how many, I guess hundreds of Thousands or, or 250,000. Yeah, so I mean I know growing company, but at what size do you have enough to really perhaps be able to offset the demand from these insatiable data centers that are continuing to build.
Sean Murray
Yeah, great question. So I guess maybe to disambiguate the kind of the wasting energy versus the kind of devices and scaling when you have limited grid capacity and you have wind farms or solar farms, these are big utility scale sites that are overproducing
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
often they're actually told to turn off because the grid can't move the energy where it's needed.
Sean Murray
That's a huge waste.
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
It's a huge opportunity cost on the system.
Sean Murray
And that's a consequence of grid capacity and the other side of things. And what the solution we're looking to do is when the grid is congested, let's say there's a lot of demand on the grid.
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
Right now, it's super congested. We're shedding, let's say, renewable loads.
Sean Murray
If we can get devices and coordinate them to turn down, we can essentially
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
reduce the load on the system to allow it to flow more efficiently.
Sean Murray
So that's kind of the, it's called demand response. And we're making, essentially we're coordinating the
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
consumer demand base to be more reactive
Sean Murray
and intelligent in responding to the conditions,
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
the real time conditions, the grid.
Sean Murray
So that's kind of essentially what we're
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
looking to do with the kind of
Sean Murray
energy network and the coordination system that's
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
kind of all incentivized with the kind of energy dollar token that we'll be releasing.
Sean Murray
And then in terms of like, what, how much is actually needed. So right now, you know, you can look at like a smart thermostat, which is, you know, probably got like a kilowatt or two, depends on like the house and the heating system, and that's kind of got a kilowatt or two of, you know, like flexibility that you
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
can ramp up or ramp down on demand.
Sean Murray
Similarly with batteries, you can go up to like a kind of standard is
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
around 10 kilowatts that you can kind of ramp up or around down.
Sean Murray
And then, you know, similarly with EVs
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
and, and solar panels.
Sean Murray
So if you can, like, it's actually the, the threshold of devices that you need to kind of make a difference and start, you know, kind of playing in things like power flexibility markets and kind of actually starting to kind of
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
earn for load shifting.
Sean Murray
It's actually quite low. It's only about 0.1 megawatts. So we're talking about, you know, 100 homes with, with, we're talking about 100 homes with smart thermostats or, you know,
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
you know, 10, 20 with, with batteries
Sean Murray
that, you know, can we can start
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
participating in power markets.
Sean Murray
Then when you're talking about like data centers themselves, you know, they go into the, you know, tens, hundreds of megawatts generally. So what we're talking about is, you know, tens of thousands of homes to kind of offset a typical data center.
Steve Ehrlich
Okay.
Sean Murray
And yeah, so I think like in Terms of like the economics, it's actually, actually kind of makes sense because a lot of these devices are actually already there in homes already.
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
They're just unused.
Sean Murray
So you could be, you know, you, you, you could have a smart thermostat
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
at home that you're just using for
Sean Murray
your, for your temperature when you could actually be contributing to the grid, providing
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
services to the grid and earning for that as well.
Steve Ehrlich
Okay, interesting. So let's get a little bit more into the specifics of, of your token and the energy network. I believe it's either, I guess Q1 is just about over. So I'm guessing you're going to try to launch in Q2. Can you give us an update on that? And I believe there's going to be a 10 billion token supply and you have some, there's different distributions for users versus investors versus the company and plan burns, et cetera. So just briefly, kind of walk us through the setup, the tokenomics, how this is going to work and what is the utility of these tokens because you got a no action letter from the sec, which really only comes when they believe that the token is going to actually have utility and not just be a tool for speculation.
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
Exactly. And that's something we've emphasized from the very start.
Sean Murray
We're regulated in two different industries heavily, so energy and crypto. So everything we've done has been with
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
an ear towards compliance, ensuring that we,
Sean Murray
you know, release something that's actually useful and not just, you know, an investment
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
vehicle or a speculation vehicle basically.
Sean Murray
And so how the kind of token works is very simple for the user. You know, user kind of logs on to our kind of fuse app and they kind of have to be, you
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
know, provided, being provided energy by us
Sean Murray
and they can connect their devices. So things like, you know, I want to, let's say, let's say I connect
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
my Tesla EV charger, so I sign
Sean Murray
into my Tesla and I grant permissions in the app. I say I want my Tesla to
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
be charged 20% or 70% by 8am every morning.
Sean Murray
And then outside of that, I don't
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
care what you do with it.
Sean Murray
You can kind of use that to provide grid services and optimize grid and
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
reduce grid congestion in the background.
Sean Murray
And for that I provide direct value and I'm generating direct value and contributing
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
to actually the energy system.
Sean Murray
And for that I'm getting rewards in
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
our kind of native token built on Savannah, which is the energy dollar.
Sean Murray
And for those rewards essentially then what happens is I unlock discounts on goods
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
and services within the Fuse ecosystem.
Sean Murray
So let's say later when I want to install a new solar array on my roof, let's say that solar array costs 15 grand. I can actually take the tokens that I've earned, burn them, which reduces the supply of the tokens and access, let's say, you know, let's say I burn $1,000 worth of tokens and I can access a, you know, two, $3,000 discount
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
on my solar array.
Sean Murray
So that's the kind of idea of essentially how, you know, tokens are emitted to users for providing real utility and real value to the energy system and then how they're essentially then burned and taken out of supply for, for actually like real utility in terms of, you know, value for the user more broadly. Yeah, so essentially the kind of emissions are kind of aligned with energy transition schedules. So we think very long term, we think that's the only way to build a kind of generational company. So the kind of emission schedule is out to 2050. And the idea is that we're slowly emitting to users over time as the kind of user base, the network grows. But then also as the network is growing and more people are redeeming where we're burning more and reducing supply, want
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
to burn about 50% of supply through
Sean Murray
these customer kind of redemptions between now
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
and kind of the end of the
Sean Murray
emission schedule, probably kind of how the kind of token supply works.
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
And
Steve Ehrlich
I am curious and I mean I understand sometimes talking about the sec, there may be limits to what you can share, but the token is going to be listed on exchanges. I know Coinbase has already mentioned that it's on the roadmap and I'm sure that it's going to show up on various Dexes as well. So there is an opportunity to get liquidity for the token. There are options beyond just redeeming it for discounts and then burning it. Did the SEC have any concerns about the types of exchanges it would list on or how many or was it really focused just as long as there actually is concrete utility and it's not being marketed as a security that that was sufficient to get the no action status?
Sean Murray
Yeah, I think like the, like the, the SEC letter was huge for us. So it was, and it was the product of months of like very constructive
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
engagement with the, with the commission.
Sean Murray
So essentially their, their main focus was around the utility and the fundamental mechanics
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
of the token as opposed to where it would be listed.
Sean Murray
The idea is, yeah, essentially what they cared about was is there really a consumptive utility to the token in the sense that people actually use the token
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
and burn it and extinguish it for
Sean Murray
actual consumptive value, which is buying something
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
that they're looking to acquire.
Sean Murray
And that was, that was the main kind of focus for them. And ultimately there was a lot of back and forth. But for on the secondary market side of things like the, the idea for the secondary markets is to, you know,
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
to facilitate,
Sean Murray
facilitate exchange between, you know,
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
net buyers and net sellers of the token.
Sean Murray
That was ultimately like exactly. How we do that, you know, is as long as it's, you know, compliant and the, and in line with the
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
kind of details presented in the SEC
Sean Murray
letter, there wasn't much further kind of
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
discussion around exchanges where we list or the particular venues.
Steve Ehrlich
And I saw, I believe I read somewhere that you're not going to be having any sort of airdrop, which is interesting. And from my opinion, I believe if that's true, it's a good choice because it kind of could limit the chances of just a big surge in usage from airdrop farmers that could then lead to a massive withdrawal whenever the airdrops end. And for a business and an industry that's already highly volatile, that's probably something that you're looking to avoid. Do you have any expectations for how this is going to change the usage, the growth of your network? Do you have any sense of what would be an ideal burn rate to get to the 5 billion, anything you could share along those lines?
Sean Murray
Yeah, sure. And I think this is again what kind of distinguishes us from like a typical Deepin category project. Like I think I would kind of describe this as energy infrastructure over Deepin because historically deep ins are, you know, very supply constrained. They need people to, you know, buy their XYZ proprietary devices and often they give away a lot of supply in
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
order to try and bootstrap that.
Sean Murray
Right. We don't have that issue at all. We're device agnostic. We have a captain user base of
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
hundreds of thousands of users already that's only going to grow.
Sean Murray
You know, we're hoping to hit, you
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
know, over a million users over the
Sean Murray
next, over a million kind of homes over the next 12 months. And so we're not really under that constraint that we need to like shed
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
a ton of supply in order to
Sean Murray
get people on board and onto the
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
network and using it.
Sean Murray
And we don't need people to buy, you know, our proprietary hardware.
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
They can just connect stuff that they have at home already.
Sean Murray
Although we are looking to release proprietary
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
hardware over the next few months, which should be interesting.
Sean Murray
But I mean, I think as a consequence, you know, ultimately, I think when I look at airdrops, I think they're going to be viewed, you know, historically as the most expensive marketing campaigns in history. Like when you look at like giving away $200 million worth of, worth of tokens to often what are like, you know, can be, you know, you know, kind of mercenary farmers, I think it's just net negative for the projects. And the way we're looking at it is we're going to like consist, we're going to provide tokens and distribute tokens for, you know, the, the fundamental value that the network is generating and, and not for spammy, like kind of, you
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
know, quests and that kind of thing.
Sean Murray
Like no shade against that if you want to do it. It's a great way to get distribution, but it's not really the way we're
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
looking to approach things.
Sean Murray
And we think, you know, when we're actually looking at, okay, we want this to be still working and usable, you know, in 2050, you know, after, you know, 50, 100 years of, you know, feuds growing and becoming like globally dominant as an energy major, the way we see and you know, the lens through which we make these decisions using that, it just felt like giving away a ton of supply to get like early
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
kind of eyeballs just wasn't quite like our kind of, you know, skin. So.
Sean Murray
Makes sense.
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
And yeah, that was the idea.
Steve Ehrlich
One more quick one before we wrap up. Do you have any contingency plans in case people don't want to trade in these tokens for discounts, but instead, even if they're not airdrop farming, they're farming for tokens and they prefer to sell them on the open markets so the supply doesn't decrease. And that flywheel. I know you didn't use the word term flywheel. I guess I am. But if that momentum doesn't start, do you have any sense of what you might do if that situation occurs?
Sean Murray
I mean, for us, I think, to be honest. Well, a. I think many projects you can kind of ask that for almost any project. Like what, what happens if the, if
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
people don't use the token Right.
Steve Ehrlich
And, and I have to be, to be perfect.
Sean Murray
But like, I think, I mean, for us, the way we've built this product is incredibly native and seamless with the
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
rest of the product as a whole.
Sean Murray
So, you know, we're using embedded wallets that, you know, essentially you get, you, you get your tokens kind of dropped for making these activities and it feels very seamless.
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
To like the rest of the product
Sean Murray
that you're using, that you're like using for your energy supply and paying your
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
bills every month on.
Sean Murray
And the way we're looking at it is that we, we're just essentially making it as seamless for the web 2 or the web 3 user to use
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
these tokens as possible.
Sean Murray
And like, essentially if I'm getting dropped these tokens and I'm looking to buy stuff within our ecosystem and these tokens are available and in my wallet and we say we can show you that
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
this is the amount of discount you get when you burn them and extinguish these tokens and reduce the supply.
Sean Murray
Like that is a very seamless and integrated experience for the user and it's something that it's like, it's a direct immediate value to the user that like we think is going to be, you know, a no brainer for them when
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
they, when they actually want to, when they go to, to buy these products.
Sean Murray
So we don't, we don't view it as, you know, having contingencies in place. I think, you know, especially the kind of, I think, you know, down the line, I think the, the kind of buyback and burn mechanism that is touted by a lot of projects today which is, you know, very successful extensively. I just, I think from a compliance perspective we weren't totally comfortable with that. And so we're really relying and pushing on, you know, fundamentals and creating value for the network because we think that's what is going to make this network
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
stand up for decades as opposed to years.
Steve Ehrlich
Okay. All right, well we're just about a time. Is there anything, I didn't ask you anything else that you'd like to leave our listeners and viewers with?
Sean Murray
I think mainly just, you know, if you want to learn about, more about what Fuse are building and the energy Network and follow us on Fuse Energy on X and yes, stay tuned. Over the next couple of weeks we've got some kind of exciting announcements and you know, competitions and events planned and you know, obviously we've got TGE coming up. So yeah, looking forward to the launch and hoping to bring people along the road.
Sean Murray (continuation or co-speaker)
Great.
Steve Ehrlich
All right, well Sean, thanks so much for joining. Thanks everybody for watching and listening. That'll wrap things up for bits and bits. The interview,
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Date: March 28, 2026
Host: Steve Ehrlich (Head of Research, Sharplink)
Guest: Sean Murray (Head of Special Projects & Crypto Lead, Fuse Energy)
In this episode, Steve Ehrlich speaks with Sean Murray from Fuse Energy, a UK-based full-stack energy company, about the intersection of crypto, decentralized physical infrastructure (DePin), and energy market volatility. They explore how grid congestion mirrors blockchain network congestion, the mechanics of energy market price discovery, and Fuse’s novel token-based demand response system. The episode dives into the company’s roots, regulatory journey, and the tokenomics of their forthcoming blockchain-based energy platform aimed at reducing grid congestion and making a real-world impact.
Demand Response via Tokenized Incentives:
Real Utility, Not Just “Crypto for the Sake of It”:
On Grid vs. Blockchain Analogy:
On Real-World Impact:
On True Utility vs. Speculation:
On Airdrops and Distribution:
| Timestamp | Segment Description | |-----------|--------------------| | 03:02-03:54 | Fuse’s business model & vertical integration explained | | 04:46-08:42 | Energy market volatility, differences between Europe & US, and the impact of recent global events | | 14:06-19:29 | Power market price discovery, inelastic demand, and how Fuse hedges energy exposure | | 24:33-29:14 | The grid as an L1 infrastructure problem & introduction of the DePin network | | 33:33-37:00 | Tokenomics: energy dollar, emissions, burns, and value flows | | 38:11-39:06 | SEC no-action letter, regulatory emphasis on utility | | 41:29-42:05 | Why Fuse Energy is not doing airdrops and the risks of incentivized farming | | 44:40-45:12 | Closing thoughts and how to follow Fuse’s progress |
This episode provides a comprehensive, jargon-light, and highly relevant discussion for listeners interested in the convergence of energy, crypto, and decentralized infrastructure. Fuse Energy’s approach to solving the grid’s ‘L1 congestion’ problem with a tokenized, compliant, real-economy solution is positioned as both pragmatic and forward thinking—directly rewarding users for participating in grid flexibility and reinvesting value into the ecosystem rather than solely relying on speculative web3 paradigms or unsustainable airdrop marketing tactics.
Sean Murray delivers nuanced, informed explanations for both industry veterans and newcomers, while Steve Ehrlich steers the conversation toward real-world impacts, regulatory nuance, and the practicalities of launching DePin at scale.
“If we can leverage all these millions of devices that are already just sitting in homes, like unused right now…we can significantly reduce congestion on the grid, which has tons of knock on effects…”
— Sean Murray, 28:35