News
Using Blockchain Technology to Reduce Water Scarcity
Much of the world takes water for granted. And much of the world has so little water that it’s a matter of life and death.
So how can we send water from surplus areas to those in need? This is the mission of Atlantis, a project dedicated to solving problems arising from climate change, focusing mainly on water. And they are trying to solve this problem using blockchain.
Irthu Suresh is a speaker at this year’s Consensus festival in Austin, Texas, May 29-31.
Atlantis is not just theoretical. In 50 villages in the Chikmagalur region of India, Atlantis implemented a Web3 solution that incentivized people to effectively transfer water from affluent to less affluent areas. A clever “bounty” system encouraged villagers to perform tasks that enabled this new distribution. And the pilot program worked. “We have exchanged more than 21,000 kiloliters of water,” says Irthu Suresh, CEO of Atlantis.
Giving a preview of what he’ll be sharing in Austin at Consensus, Suresh explains why Atlantis adopted blockchain, the challenges they had to overcome for onboarding, and why he wants the world to know that Web3 isn’t just for trading but that ” we can use it to fight water problems, to fight poverty.”
The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Atlantis didn’t start out as a blockchain organization, but you eventually incorporated the technology. What brought you to this?
Irthu Suresh: We were trying to build solutions for climate change – primarily through water – as a Web2 company, but a private entity trying to build for the commons wasn’t really hitting a chord. And we ran into all kinds of challenges with existing power structures, from regulations to the unregulated mafia in India. It is very easy to ruin an idea if it is created by a private entity. All you need is a group of lawyers.
And that got us thinking, “How can my co-founder and I become insignificant over time as this system expands?” And this led us to consider decentralized distributed systems. We thought if it works, no one should be able to take it down.
Then we realized that there were people willing to collect additional water and then feed it into the network. This was creating further reserves of surplus resources. And we asked ourselves, “What if we could build the entire system on blockchain?”
So, what does it look like exactly?
In most of the world, things like water are heavily regulated. And you have these centralized grids. But as cities and spaces expand, these centralized grids often struggle to catch up.
But India is a great example of how it was built, historically, on decentralized communities. There are small pockets of villages that take care of their needs. It’s hyperlocal. So for us it was a no-brainer to bring some kind of concept that solves resource allocation problems.
There are some parts where water is abundant and no one cares. And there are other places where access to water is life or death. So for the pilot project, when we partnered with Mercy Corps Ventures, we chose a specific location in India where on one side of this hill there is plenty of water, and on the other side of the hill there is drought. And how could people in this region exchange excess water? How might we create the infrastructure itself locally? So, for our pilot program in Chikmagalur, a rural region with 50 villages, we started with people in different water-stressed areas.
Interesting. What did your system do?
We first asked local people to volunteer to spread awareness, then we asked local people to sign up to become water collectors. Once we had these harvesters and the rain was captured, there was an opportunity to trade it.
How does blockchain fit into all this?
We built the product on a native mobile app. On this app, everyone can create a profile, register and mention their skills first. And based on the skill, we start assigning tasks to you. And these tasks are more or less building this peer-to-peer water network.
You could take part in surveys, you could take part in water sample analysis, you could sign up as someone who wants to spread awareness through seminars, or you could become a collector. All these tasks are gamified; we call them rewards. People sign up and then go through the required steps and then get incentivized. We first knew that this required a tamper-proof distributed ledger, and we knew that blockchain is useful for this purpose.
Amazing. Can you quantify the impact so far?
Yes. We exchanged more than 21,000 kiloliters of water. The network has over 3,000 people and covers 50 villages. Of the 3,000, most are consumers who access the network to access water. But we have almost 150 harvesters in the network. And then we have a group of surveyors and validators.
What is a validator in this context?
Let’s say you go online and say, “Hey, I’m a reaper.” Then we put out a bounty for someone in the location to become a validator, to go to your house and just confirm that, “Hey, these guys have the infrastructure to do this.” So what’s happening, essentially, is we’re creating a bunch of green jobs locally. And all these different tasks are gamified using our bounty system.
What problems have you encountered?
One was off-ramp. Especially in India it is difficult to go off-ramp as the regulations are still in a gray area.
And then, starting from the first MVP that we designed, at the beginning of onboarding, every time we asked people to connect to a wallet, it didn’t work. Because people said, “What’s a wallet?” And I have received absolute training in UI and UX. We really needed to figure out when is the right place to introduce blockchain or Web3 terminology.
And we had to take additional steps to educate people about it. Because people say, “Oh, it’s cryptocurrencies.” That means it’s a scam.” And we’re like, “No, no, wait!” Right? Like, there’s so much more!
What tokens are you using to guide the mechanics?
We have an internal token, which we will launch one day. During the pilot project we actively used it. But seeing how the Web3 marketplace works, we firmly believe that unless we achieve strong product-market fit, launching a token makes no sense for us.
So we have integrated a mechanism where different tokens can be introduced into the platform. If someone wants to finance a water project in Africa using Solana, they can do it, while if someone wants to build a water project in Vietnam using Optimism, they can do it. We’ve really worked on the interoperability aspect because climate change doesn’t care which chain you’re on.
Well said. Last question: what are you most looking forward to from Consensus?
So, one of the biggest lifelines for our project was Bitcoin. And I know that Consensus is a great place to go and meet people who pioneered some of these technologies that we use today.
I hope we can come and talk about the things we’ve done with blockchain, which isn’t necessarily just DeFi trading. We really want people to know that, “Hey, we can use this to fight water problems, to fight poverty.” The idea of distributed ledgers is extremely powerful. Many more people need to know that there are concrete examples of this.
Great feeling. Congratulations on what you’ve built and I’ll see you in Austin.