The problem Certino solves

Today's renewable energy certificate market is broken in three ways.

Annual averages hide the truth. Legacy Guarantees of Origin match generation to consumption yearly — but the grid runs hour by hour. Solar peaks at noon, demand peaks at 8 PM, and annual-matched certificates pretend those kWh are equal.

Small producers are locked out. The €3B European GO market was built for utilities. Households with batteries, small wind, and grid-balancing power generations like Treetino's hardware earn nothing extra for time-shifting kWh into peak demand. 30–50% of revenue evaporates in middleman fees.

Provenance is "trust us." Most certificates retire in private registries with no public proof. EU RED III will mandates hourly matching in 2030. CSRD demands location-bound evidence. The market has no rails for either.

Certino fixes all three. Every clean kWh mints as an on-chain ERC-721 with hour, location, fuel type, and device ID. Buyers deposit EURC into transparent pools that settle monthly against the EPEX SPOT auction. Producers earn a premium when OTE-CR clearing exceeds threshold — when the grid actually needs the energy. Buyer identity is a soulbound NFT, audit-grade and non-transferable.

What it enables:

• Households with Victron inverters earn premium credits for time-shifting into peak demand
• Corporates get CSRD/Scope 2 evidence with cryptographic provenance
• ESG auditors verify claims without registry intermediation
• Small grid-enhancers get their fair share of a market that used to ignore them

Real kWh. Real money. Real provenance. Every hour, on-chain.

Challenges we ran into

Transforming our initial conceptual architecture into a seamless, end-to-end functional demo presented severe integration hurdles. The primary bottleneck was environment synchronization—specifically, coordinating complex decentralized oracle networks (Chainlink) and managing heavy data payloads across the team's distributed local development setups.
• Real Victron telemetry is unsigned JSON over REST. For dual-issuance verification we needed cryptographic attestation — couldn't ship hardware in 48h. Built an oracle that pulls VRM data, signs each pulse with EIP-712, and posts on-chain. We are implementing Chainlink Oracle to proof that the data we are getting are correct. We also explore implement ai agents to verify the weather using the GPS data we have, if the kWh were possible to produce, if no one is not faking it.

Three NFT types, one mental model. The system needs three distinct tokens: a soulbound device NFT (producer side), a soulbound account NFT (buyer side, audit identity), and a transferable certificate ERC-721 (the actual unit of trade). Keeping the user flows clean while three different mints happen across two roles took several iterations — especially making "soulbound" visually distinct from "transferable" in the UI without dropping into smart-contract jargon.

Pool settlement timing. Marketplace pools settle monthly against EPEX SPOT — but EPEX publishes day-ahead, not month-ahead. Modelled as deferred clearing: deposits enter a pending state, certificates issue post-settlement. Took two design passes to separate "deposit confirmed" (immediate receipt) from "certificate minted" (post-settlement) cleanly in the UX. Indicative €/MWh shown in the marketplace had to be visibly distinct from final settlement price.

EURC. Circle's official EURC is mainnet only — not Base Sepolia. Deployed a mock EURC with faucet, kept buyer flows identical to production integration so the demo is honest about what's mocked.

MetaMask on Amoy. RPC instability caused intermittent signing failures. Added retry with exponential backoff and a clearer "tx pending" state. For the recorded demo, pinned to a known-good endpoint.