American retail giant Walmart has received a patent for the development of the electric network, which will work with bitcoin (BTC) or other digital currency.

Yesterday the patent and trademark office (USPTO) has published the application filed by Walmart in December of last year. It describes a system whose purpose is to help companies to optimize energy consumption and to manage demand on the electricity network with distributed registry.

In the patent said to use the network of energy consuming devices based on the blockchain will be able to as households, and large organizations. They will also be able to allocate each device a certain amount of BTC or any other cryptocurrency used to purchase energy from the utility provider.

“Each token will represent a unit of energy. For example, if 1 unit of the cryptocurrency will be equivalent to 1 kWh, the interface provider 131 will receive 800 coins for the consumption of 800 kWh of electricity per month”, — the document says.

If one of the devices exceed your limit cryptocurrencies, to ensure the continuation of work during the settlement period, the missing funds he will be able to select a different device. Likewise the network can also share energy with each other.

Depending on how the system is programmed, excess cryptocurrencies can either be sold or be directed to repay the bills for the next month. The system described is also capable of tracking which network devices consumes more energy compared to others.

In the patent application points out that “the use of cryptocurrency can be resolved independently from the Central database system, such as the Central Bank, the Central management system or Central authority managed by the energy supplier.”

This patent is one of several applications Walmart to integrate the blockchain in cycles of the supply chain giant. In the list there is also a service that will record customer purchases on the blockchain that will allow him to resell the goods with this record.

Another patent application which the company submitted in March, called Smart Package. It uses a tool based on the blockchain to track the contents of the package, its environmental conditions, location and so on.

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