Starpower

Starpower is a decentralized physical infrastructure network (DePIN) built on Solana that connects distributed energy devices — home batteries, electric vehicles, solar panels, air conditioners, and water heaters — into a coordinated virtual power plant. Device owners earn STAR tokens by contributing their hardware to a shared grid-stabilization network. The project has raised $4 million from Framework Ventures, Alliance DAO, and Solana Ventures, and reports 1.5 million registered wallets across 79 countries as of early 2025.

The Problem Starpower Addresses

Modern electricity grids face a structural mismatch: power demand peaks sharply at predictable times, but generation capacity must be sized to cover those peaks even when most of it sits idle. Utilities manage this through demand-response programs — paying large industrial customers to reduce load during peak hours — but the hundreds of millions of home batteries, EVs, and smart appliances now in consumer hands go uncoordinated. Their potential to absorb or discharge energy at exactly the moments the grid needs it is largely wasted.

Starpower's approach is to apply the same coordination logic that ride-sharing used to aggregate idle vehicles — this time aggregating idle energy capacity at scale. The company positions itself as an open protocol for connecting third-party energy devices, taking a platform approach rather than selling proprietary hardware to every customer.

How the Network Works

Starpower's architecture sits on three layers: IoT connectivity, an AI coordination engine, and a blockchain settlement layer on Solana.

Device owners connect hardware to the network through direct API integrations that Starpower has built with major energy device manufacturers, giving it cross-brand control from a single interface. Once connected, devices become nodes in what Starpower calls BeeGrid Energy Cloud, its virtual power plant infrastructure. The BeeGrid system directs when connected devices should charge or discharge based on real-time grid conditions and local electricity prices, executing the kind of demand-response coordination that utilities historically reserved for industrial partners.

The AI layer handles electricity price arbitrage — instructing a home battery to charge when overnight prices are low and discharge when daytime prices peak. Users do not need to manually configure these decisions; the system optimizes automatically within parameters the user sets.

STAR tokens are the settlement mechanism. Device owners earn STAR by contributing to grid stability: allowing the network to partially direct their device's charge state in response to grid conditions. The tokens can also be used to purchase energy services within the Starpower ecosystem. According to CoinMarketCap's project summary, total STAR supply is capped at one billion tokens, with 70 percent allocated to network participants (builders), 15 percent to investors, and 15 percent to the team. Investor and team allocations carry multi-year vesting schedules.

Hardware Entry Points

Starpower offers two hardware paths into the network. The Starplug is a smart plug device that monitors home energy usage and earns STAR rewards. It provides the lowest-cost entry point — primarily a data and measurement device rather than an energy storage unit.

The more substantial offering is the GVP01 AI Home Battery, developed in partnership with GreenGiga. The GVP01 is an AI-driven residential battery that performs electricity price arbitrage automatically and can operate as a Virtual Power Plant node within BeeGrid. Users who connect the GVP01 earn STAR tokens for contributing to grid stability. Starpower unveiled this device in January 2026, marking its first significant hardware product beyond the Starplug.

DePINscan puts the public-sale device price at $100, though this figure may refer specifically to the Starplug rather than the GVP01.

Network Scale and Revenue

As of the $2.5 million funding round announced in January 2025, Starpower reported 1.5 million registered wallets, more than 16,000 activated devices, and $1 million in cumulative revenue, per The Block's reporting on the round. DePINscan records the network as operating across 79 countries and regions.

:::metric-cards

• label: Registered wallets value: 1.5M compare_label: as of Jan 2025 sentiment: positive
• label: Activated devices value: 16,000+ compare_label: as of Jan 2025 sentiment: positive
• label: Countries/regions value: 79 compare_label: DePINscan sentiment: positive
• label: Total funding raised value: $4M compare_label: Jan 2025 sentiment: positive :::

The gap between 1.5 million wallets and 16,000 activated devices is substantial. Wallet registration is a low-friction action during an airdrop or incentive campaign; activated devices require a physical purchase and installation. The network's longer-term value depends on closing that ratio, which is why hardware quality and unit economics matter as much as wallet counts.

Funding and Investors

Starpower raised a pre-seed round of $1.5 million led by Alliance DAO in mid-2024. In January 2025, Framework Ventures led a $2.5 million follow-on round joined by Solana Ventures and Bitscale Capital, bringing total disclosed funding to $4 million, per The Block.

:::callout{type="quote" label="Funding context" source="The Block, January 2025"} Framework Ventures led the $2.5 million round alongside Solana Ventures and Bitscale Capital, bringing Starpower's total funding to $4 million. :::

Solana Ventures' participation is notable beyond the capital: Solana's investment arm has been selective in its DePIN commitments, and Starpower was identified as a priority project for the energy vertical.

Team

Laser Ding is CEO and co-founder. No other executive team members were identified by name in available public sources.

Solana Fit

Starpower's choice of Solana reflects the specific requirements of a DePIN with millions of potential device interactions. At the scale the company targets — tens of millions of devices across global grids — the network would generate a continuous stream of settlement events: devices reporting energy contributions, triggering micropayment rewards, and logging participation proofs. Solana's transaction throughput and low per-transaction fees make high-frequency micropayment settlement economically viable in a way that would be prohibitively expensive on higher-fee chains.

The Solana Foundation has invested directly in Starpower through Solana Ventures and maintains a dedicated DePIN team. In a November 2024 discussion covering energy DePIN published by DePIN Scan, Kuleen, the Foundation's DePIN lead, pointed to Solana's technical architecture and its DePIN-native developer community as the primary factors drawing energy projects to the chain.

Audits and Security

No independent smart contract audits for Starpower's Solana programs were identified in available public sources as of the time of writing. Users connecting physical devices to the network should evaluate both the software risk and the energy-management permissions they grant the system over their home devices.

Market Context

Starpower positions itself against the $1.5 trillion global renewable energy market and aims to surpass Tesla's device connection count within five years. The company has set a $10 million revenue target for 2026, up from the $1 million reported at the January 2025 funding announcement.

The energy DePIN category is early. Coordinating heterogeneous consumer hardware across dozens of countries' grid regulations, device standards, and utility interconnect rules is a genuinely difficult operational problem. Reaching activated devices in 79 countries indicates real execution, but Starpower has not published audited financials or detailed per-country device metrics that would let observers independently verify the headline figures.

The January 2025 funding round confirmed that two infrastructure-focused investors — Framework Ventures and Solana Ventures — reviewed Starpower's traction and committed capital. For an energy DePIN at this stage, that backing is the most concrete independent signal of project credibility available from public sources.