Sourceful Energy

Sourceful Energy — known by its earlier brand Srcful — is a Swedish company founded in 2022 that applies decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) principles to the energy sector. Its core product is a community-driven virtual power plant (VPP) built on Solana, where participants connect their distributed energy resources (DERs) — rooftop solar inverters, home battery systems, and eventually electric vehicles — to a shared network, earn token rewards for verifiable energy contributions, and collectively sell grid services to energy companies and grid operators.

The Virtual Power Plant Concept

A virtual power plant aggregates many small, geographically dispersed energy assets into a single coordinated resource that can respond to signals from grid operators. Traditional VPPs are managed by utilities or large aggregators; Sourceful's version is community-owned and blockchain-coordinated.

The basic logic: when the grid needs to balance supply and demand, the aggregated devices in the Sourceful network can modulate their output or consumption. Grid operators compensate the VPP operator for providing that flexible capacity. Sourceful distributes a portion of that revenue — along with SRC token rewards — to the homeowners and businesses whose devices contributed.

The project's founders were explicit that, in the near term, participation does not involve sharing or trading physical electricity across the grid. Instead, participants share verified energy production and consumption data, and agree to let their devices participate in ancillary services (reducing output on request, for example). The trading of electricity between participants is described as a future capability.

Energy Gateway Hardware

The physical entry point to the network is the Sourceful Energy Gateway, a hardware device sold at $149 through RAK Wireless. The gateway connects to compatible solar inverters and battery storage systems via a local network connection, then attests the device's identity and energy data to the Solana blockchain.

Once connected, each distributed energy resource is assigned a unique on-chain digital identity. The gateway continuously reports telemetry — energy production, storage state, and grid interactions — that the network uses both to calculate rewards and to verify that claimed energy contributions are real. The gateway was listed as sold out across all regional variants (Europe, US, UK, Australia) as of mid-2024, reflecting demand that outpaced initial supply.

Supported device compatibility is maintained in the project's documentation. The founding team, led by CEO Fredrik Ahlgren (who holds a PhD in energy efficiency and has a background in marine engineering and IoT), built the gateway and underlying software with an open-source approach; the organization's 37 GitHub repositories are licensed under Apache-2.0 and MIT and show active development.

Solana and Token Mechanics

Sourceful launched SRC token rewards on Solana (as an SPL22 token) in January 2024 for beta contributors. The maximum supply of SRC is 250 billion tokens. Early participants who connected gateways and contributed energy data during the beta phase earned SRC allocations that would make them eligible for the full token launch.

The token distribution structure allocates the majority of supply to network rewards, with a smaller portion to investors. The project received backing from the Swedish Energy Agency and institutional support from Swedish universities rather than venture capital, and the team bootstrapped early development before securing those grants.

Separately, Sourceful proposed becoming a subnetwork of Helium — the established DePIN wireless network that migrated to Solana — under a proposal that would have introduced a distinct ENERGY token. In that design, existing Helium IoT hotspot operators could earn ENERGY tokens alongside their IoT rewards by participating in Sourceful's energy coordination layer, expanding the network footprint without requiring additional hardware purchases. That proposal entered community discussion in 2024 with a token structure that included 250 billion total tokens, significant reserves for network rewards, and a gateway-vendor staking requirement to maintain quality standards.

In 2025, Sourceful announced a dual-mining integration with Entropy (ENT), allowing Sourceful Energy Gateways to mine ENT tokens alongside SRC rewards — another layer of incentive for early hardware operators.

Network Scale and Geography

As of October 2024, reporting from Syndica's DePIN market analysis described the Sourceful network as tracking thousands of kilowatt-hours monthly, with device counts continuing to grow. The seasonal pattern of the network reflects its primary geography: most devices are in Swedish homes, and power generation peaks during summer months. This concentration in Sweden is consistent with the founding team's base and with the Swedish Energy Agency's early-stage support.

Revenue Model and Grid Services

Sourceful's commercial model sits at the intersection of energy markets and DePIN tokenomics. On the energy market side, the aggregated VPP can bid into ancillary services markets — providing frequency response, capacity reserves, or demand flexibility to grid operators, who pay for the service. On the data side, the verified, real-time telemetry the network collects has value to utilities and researchers.

The token rewards bootstrap participation before those commercial revenue streams are fully established — a pattern common to DePIN networks where token incentives attract the early hardware operators who make the network useful enough to generate real-world revenue.

Evolution Toward Commercial Energy Infrastructure

Since its DePIN launch, Sourceful has expanded its commercial footprint beyond consumer solar-and-battery owners toward industrial and commercial property operators. The company now offers battery storage deployments to commercial and industrial facilities in Sweden under a "Flexibility as a Service" model, handling installation, monitoring, maintenance, and grid service operations for property owners who want to monetize their grid connection without managing energy markets themselves.

In February 2026, Swedish utility Kalmar Energi launched a white-label app called Zap, built on Sourceful's platform, to give residential customers real-time P1/HAN meter data and energy visibility. The Zap device and accompanying software represent a separate product line from the blockchain-based VPP network, aimed at utilities wanting to offer smart meter experiences under their own brand.

The company launched a Sourceful Spark Initiative, a grants program awarding $1,000 USDC to community contributors who build integrations and tools that extend the network — for example, a Home Assistant integration for the Zap P1 meter.

Fit Within Solana's DePIN Ecosystem

Sourceful sits within the growing cluster of DePIN projects that use Solana's low transaction costs and fast finality to coordinate physical hardware at scale. Energy-focused DePIN projects face a distinct challenge compared to wireless or compute networks: the underlying resource (electricity) is heavily regulated, geographically specific, and already served by incumbent utilities. Sourceful's approach — beginning with data aggregation and ancillary services before moving to full energy trading — threads that regulatory needle by avoiding direct peer-to-peer electricity sales in early phases.

The project's alignment with Helium's established subnetwork model, its open-source development, and its backing from Swedish public energy institutions position it as one of the more grounded attempts to apply DePIN token incentives to the energy transition, anchored in a real geographic market with existing utility relationships rather than purely speculative tokenomics.