The night without lamps
Kijiji, a farming town on Kenya’s shores of Lake Victoria, sinks into darkness every evening. Mary — a local electrician with a dream to turn rooftops into mini-power plants — has half-built proposals for twenty solar home systems. Banks reject her: “The ticket size is too small, collateral too thin, credit file too short.”
• Problem – the financing gap: 750 million people still lack reliable electricity; small- and mid-scale solar projects like Mary’s are deemed too risky or fragmented for traditional lenders.

Solution – a borderless liquidity pool.
Mary uploads her project to OnGrid’s marketplace. Thousands of micro-investors from Lagos to Lisbon commit capital in minutes. An on-chain risk-assessment engine crunches her device specs, local tariff history, and mobile-money receipts, automatically pricing her loan. Smart contracts escrow the funds and schedule repayments from future energy sales. Mary installs the panels; children finish homework under LED light.

The credits no one could trust
Across the ocean, Diego runs a carbon-offset desk in São Paulo. His clients demand proof that their purchases really cut emissions, but the registry documents he gets are months old and stuffed with manual audit PDFs. “How do I know the electrons flowed?” he asks.
• Problem – unverifiable impact data: Today’s carbon market leans on sporadic field inspections and siloed spreadsheets, leaving buyers doubtful and prices suppressed.

Solution – DePIN truth-telling.
Each of Mary’s inverters now hosts an OnGrid DePIN device: a tamper-proof sensor board that timestamps watt-hours, hashes them, and anchors the merkle root on-chain every hour. Diego can click a block explorer link and watch the kilowatt-hours accumulating in real time; verified carbon credits mint automatically against those cryptographic proofs. His desk pays a premium, confident the offsets are real.

The maze of middlemen
Before OnGrid, Mary juggled eight entities: hardware suppliers, installers, a fragile mobile-money ledger, two registries, and separate platforms for investors and offset buyers. Payments arrived weeks late; paperwork piled up.
• Problem – siloed value chains: Financing, monitoring, credit issuance, and revenue sharing live on disconnected rails, breeding delay and cost.

Solution – one composable protocol.
OnGrid stitches the rails together. From Mary’s dashboard she sees capital inflows, live energy output, automated credit minting, and the revenue split flowing to her wallet and to investors. Suppliers plug in to sell equipment, auditors read the same immutable data, and Diego’s purchase settles instantly in USDC. Friction turns into flywheel.