Can crypto accelerate the deployment of energy infrastructure?

Glow is working on a new kinds of energy incentives.

At Cyan Ventures, we invest in the foundational systems that will power a more productive world.

Glow is a community that directly incentivizes the construction of new energy infrastructure. It does so with a radically different approach: instead of relying on top-down subsidies or rigid utility contracts, it creates an open, competitive reward system. Solar farms opt in by contributing 100% of their future electricity revenue to the Glow network, and in return, they earn GLW tokens (and carbon credits) based on performance.

This model does something novel and powerful: it allow for decentralized coordination for adding new energy to the grid. Glow is part of a larger category of DePINs (Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks) that coordinate the buildout of real-world infrastructure through open, market-based incentives. Rather than relying on centralized planning or top-down funding, DePIN protocols use tokens to reward participants for contributing tangible resources—like energy, compute, or connectivity. A clear example is Helium, which bootstrapped a global wireless network by rewarding individuals for deploying hotspots. In just a few years, it scaled to over a million nodes—demonstrating how cryptoeconomic design can accelerate infrastructure deployment where traditional methods stall. DePIN allows societies to build things that previously required government incentives.

Solar is Glow’s first target for good reason. It's the cheapest source of new energy on Earth. Traditional infrastructure finance moves slowly. Glow accelerates deployment by making the economics and the coordination more transparent.

We see this as a new category of climate infrastructure—what we call intelligent energy. Systems that don’t just reduce emissions, but enable large-scale energy expansion. Systems that build solar where its needed most.

Glow is early, and interating rapidly. So far they’ve attracted 75 solar farms (some quite large, others very small) to their network. They’ve recently raised $30M from Union Square Ventures and Framework Ventures. Currently they are taking the learnings from Glow V1 and creating Glow V2 which promises to streamline the financing of the energy infrastructure. While early, we believe Glow represents one of the most compelling experiments yet in rethinking how energy gets financed (and built).