By Yong Oi Er
Blockchain startup 5ire offers a way to recognise companies that push sustainable goals and reward them accordingly.
Developers or organisations who follow sustainable practices when building decentralised protocols on top of its 5irechain blockchain network will be rewarded with new blocks.
5ire’s founder Pratik Gauri recently told Deeptech Times: “Anybody building on top of our infrastructure is rewarded a score, and the highest score basically gets rewarded with a block.”
A sustainable blockchain, 5irechain works on the idea of rewarding enterprises that meet the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) as well as the 650 environment, sustainability, governance metrics that it collected from different consulting companies.
“All the data on the sustainable measures that an organisation takes is fed into a mathematical algorithm after it is verified by third party sources like the United Nations, or consulting companies,” Pratik explained.
The financial reward that comes, with sustainable behaviours like using renewable energy, improving quality of education and being more inclusive of sidelined communities, is meant to encourage a shift in practices from a “for profit” paradigm that is the philosophy today to a “for benefit” paradigm that is increasing in popularity today.
Founded in August 2021 and headquartered in Britain, 5ire provides corporations the capability to store data in a decentralised manner to decrease security risk.
Co-founder Vilma Matilla explained: “If someone downloads a 5ire application on their phone in the Philippines for example, and starts to host Booking.com’s data, they can potentially get paid US$650 to US$800 a month.” The payment would be based on the amount of data hosted.
This way, companies can save on data storage and electricity cost as well as reduce cybersecurity risk, she claimed.
These are the factors that would have to be considered if the companies choose to store their information in data centres.
By hopping onto 5ire’s initiative, the companies would be doing social good by helping to improve the living standard for the disadvantaged or the poor in developing countries, Matilla added.
5ire recently received US$100 million funding by UK-based SRAM & MRAM to expand its technical pool and business operations.
Its foundational blockchain network called 5irechain is undergoing trials with organisations including with police departments in India and the United States and the Nigerian government.
Currently, 5irechain is in a Testnet trial with more than 10 companies. The Testnet will end later this month, following which organisations will be able to use its blockchain.
Pratik forecasted that by 2023, 5ire will be working with 200 companies. His revenue target in the next three years would be to hit US$1 billion.
