Widely-known as the creator of the fifth industrial revolution, Pratik Gauri, co-founder and CEO of 5ire, speaks to Rohit Chintapali on the opportunities in blockchain for Indian entrepreneurs, work with Muzaffarnagar police, and the social impact of blockchain.
How big is the opportunity in the blockchain space for India and how can blockchain solve the myriad of issues that we have in our country?
The opportunity in blockchain is massive. This is going to be the biggest revolution the world has ever seen. It is an opportunity to bring the whole world together and unite them. We can unite the populace together towards solving social problems where they are also financially rewarded. There was never such an opportunity where there was an infrastructure that could be used for this.
One move of bringing records on the chain can change the way whole India works. Many social entrepreneurs from Web1 and Web2 entrepreneurs can enter the Web3 space. And they have the freedom to basically curate a future which is going to solve all social problems of India through blockchain.
There’s never been a technology that I’ve particularly seen in the thirty years that I’ve been alive, which had the power to solve basic social problems, be it water or education or poverty or climate or using of renewables. You can do all of that through DAOs and blockchain. And when you do that, you end up making the world more sustainable, green, secure and transparent. Blockchain is key to empowering communities and uniting diversity.
But people who are getting into the space need to be mindful that they are building sustainable solutions. Because if they don’t do it then they are going to go back to the problem where they are trying to solve sustainability two years from now.
Web2 was amazing. Artificial Intelligence and fourth industrial revolution are also amazing. But despite them, the problems with humanity still persist and continue to plague us. Technology is useless until it is used for humanity.
In India, entrepreneurs have the opportunity to address one-and-a-half billion people by using Web3 and blockchain. As entrepreneurs, we must come together and solve social problems through Web3 and blockchain.
How do you intend to bring about the fifth industrial revolution and how is it different from the fourth industrial revolution?
The fourth industrial revolution was all about cloud computing, artificial intelligence, IoT, 3d printing and more – which are amazing. It made life easy. But they haven’t still solved the basic problems for humanity.
The thesis that we, at 5ire, have been promoting is that we are going to use technology as a force for good and humanity – not against humanity. What that means is we are going to basically prove the thesis at large, that you can make more money if you do good to the world.
There are about one-and-a-half billion people who don’t have access to traditional banking – who don’t have access to credit. They’ve been left out of the financial system. We want to give them power, to be a part of the entire community.
At 5ire, we have built products and have an ecosystem. We are the world’s first sustainable blockchain ecosystem. We have our own layer-one blockchain, which uses proof-of-benefit as a consensus and doesn’t use proof-of-work or proof-of-stake. We don’t need mining, which makes us sustainable. We have our own NFT metaverse marketplace. We have our own wallets, but the cool thing being that you don’t need hexadecimal addresses.
We also have our own venture capital fund, and then we have our own digital university to educate kids in their 20s. We do this by sponsoring hackathons across different universities and then bring them either into the workforce and ask them to build decentralized protocols, which are going to change the world for good. So, this is what we have built in essence.
Our overarching goal is to create the fifth industrial revolution to impact the people positively by solving basic social problems. For instance, we are working on a smart policing/predictive policing system with the Muzaffarnagar police in India. We are also working on the same kind of policing system in the state of Nebraska, in the US. We are also working with the Nigerian government in the agricultural space. Additionally, we are working with Huawei and have also targeted traditional finance players because you cannot impact a billion people just by creating technology. We have built an infrastructure and it is being used by large players so that it can impact on a billion+ people.
So, we are working with governments, Fortune 500 companies, and family offices, to bring about a positive change – which is not only making the world more abundant, but also greener.
Could you tell us a bit more about your work with Muzaffarnagar police?
What we are doing in collaboration with Muzaffarnagar police is that we are creating a duplicate chain and bringing all the records onto it using different use cases. We are not tampering with the existing one because we are running a pilot. Currently, we are in the testnet phase. The launch of our main net will happen at the end of this year.
One use case of ours is data storage – showing how it’s more cost-effective, how it’s more secure, and how it’s more transparent. And of course, it is immutable. We are also developing a smart policing system where FIRs are going to be lodged on the chain. This basically means that any third-party can see what’s happening with the FIRs. This gives you more speed. It also gives you more cost-efficiency and saves a lot of time.
