  Crowdsourcing relies on people's contributions to meet product- or
system-level objectives. Crowdsourcing-based methods have been implemented in
various cyber-physical systems and realtime markets. This paper explores a
framework for Crowdsourced Energy Systems (CES), where small-scale energy
generation or energy trading is crowdsourced from distributed energy resources,
electric vehicles, and shapable loads. The merits/pillars of energy
crowdsourcing are discussed. Then, an operational model for CESs in
distribution networks with different types of crowdsourcees is proposed. The
model yields a market equilibrium depicting traditional and distributed
generator and load setpoints. Given these setpoints, crowdsourcing incentives
are designed to steer crowdsourcees to the equilibrium. As the number of
crowdsourcees and energy trading transactions scales up, a secure energy
trading platform is required. To that end, the presented framework is
integrated with a lightweight Blockchain implementation and smart contracts.
Numerical tests are provided to showcase the overall implementation.
