Engie sells one of its blockchain activities to FeverTokens

Will the adventure have lived up to all its promises? After several years of operation, French energy giant Engie has decided to sell Rockside, which is one of its blockchain activities.

Launched in 2018, Rockside is a system that allows you to keep the management of your wallets and nodes on any type of blockchain, EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) or private.

To date, Rockside is already running on Archipels, a consortium blockchain shared by Engie, EDF, Caisse des Dépôts and La Poste, among others.

If Engie is interested in blockchain, it is mainly for questions of data transmission and payment operations. Such operations are already widely processed within Archipels at a daily rate of around 200,000 invoices.

"Engie has been concretely involved in blockchain since 2016, but remains fairly discreet on the subject. The people working on the subject at Engie are fairly pragmatic and don't have a fixed position on the public/private blockchain debate. In fact, Rockside is compatible with EVM", says a source close to the matter.

Does this sale mean that the Group is withdrawing from blockchain issues? "It's more a form of delegation," explains a source close to Engie. "The idea for them is to focus on their core business, which is energy, avoiding spreading themselves too thin as much as possible," this source adds.

Also according to our information, it is start-up FeverTokens, which specialises in designing and securing smart contracts, that could get its hands on Rockside.

Based in Paris, FeverTokens has just signed an exclusive takeover option according to our information. "For major industrial groups, solutions like Rockside that allow them to retain control over the management of nodes and wallets are essential if they are to operate on a blockchain without being dependent on a third-party player," explains Zakaryae Boudi, CEO of FeverTokens.

In addition to its involvement in the work on blockchain being carried out by banking messenger Swift (read our article), FeverTokens is also working with several French banks on similar experiments and is currently in discussions with several US financial institutions.