Nothing is more essential to the survival of life than water. However, 785 million people lack access to safe water, according to Water.org, a global nonprofit organization working to bring water and sanitation to the world.
The lack of clean, safe water for drinking, cooking, growing crops, and bathing is a global crisis affecting millions of people from cities and towns in the United States and megacities in Asia to Cape Town and the sub-Sahara of Africa. Safe water impacts every aspect of life and without it, communities and families are bound to a life of poverty for generations.
According to Water.org, nearly 1 million people die each year from water, sanitation, and hygiene-related diseases. Every 2 minutes a child dies from a water-related disease and diarrhea is the third leading cause of child death.
The lack of access to safe water creates a health crisis, educational crisis, and economic crisis.
Clean water and safe sanitation are catalysts to greater opportunities for prosperity and development. Imagine what can happen when safe water and sanitation are readily accessible to communities across the globe:
People are able to practice good hygiene and sanitation.
The spread of infectious diseases decreases, the overall health of people improves, and mortality rates decline.
The significant number of hours women and girls spend collecting water can instead be put toward learning trades to diversify and generate income and attending school to improve education, respectively.
Physical injury from lifting and carrying heavy loads of water will reduce.
Clean water for crops and livestock presents additional opportunities for sustenance and diversification of income.
According to Water.org, $260 billion is lost globally each year due to a lack of basic water and sanitation. Poor health and the time required to source and retrieve water have significant impacts on one’s ability to gain an education and generate work opportunities, which further contributes to the cycle of poverty.
Blockchain Initiatives Are Making Waves
While incredible progress has been made over the past 20 years as a result of significant efforts made by many global nonprofit organizations, including Water.org and Worldvision.org, much more still needs to be done.
WaterChain.io is a blockchain project that envisions making significant strides in ensuring people from all over the world have access to safe water.
Riggs Eckelberry, co-founder and Chairman of WaterChain, along with his team of experts in blockchain, technology, and finance, experiences daily a collective response from the crypto community desiring to change the world through improved water quality and supply.
An Intro to WaterChain.io
WaterChain.io is a public company that has invested over a decade in commercializing the technology in the water industry. They are creating a decentralized water funding platform with the help of blockchain technology and leading water innovators to dramatically improve the quality of water worldwide.
The principal idea is based on funding their own ideal treatment facility systems using the power of crypto funding.
According to WaterChain, 80% of water worldwide is released untreated. While Israel recycles 80% of its water, the US recycles only 1% of its current water supply. And the second country to lead in the recycling efforts is Spain at only 20%.
The Backdrop of Their Efforts – A Broken Water Ecosystem
Presenting in Silicon Valley at d10e, the leading conference on decentralization, CEO Riggs Eckelberry reports that the “infrastructure of the centralized water treatment system is decaying and forcing decentralization toward smarter, real-time, distributed, modular, onsite water treatment and recycling facilities.”
Forced decentralization, as explained by Mr. Eckelberry, is when sewage plants of municipalities refuse sewage water from factories, schools, agricultural farms, etc. requiring that they treat their own water.
WaterChain-Blockchain Initiative
This trend in the water industry has created an opportunity, resulting in a movement toward outsourcing modular systems and OIT devices. And through this Blockchain technology platform, initial coin offerings provide a new mechanism for funding, where token holders fund projects and share in the profits.
Eckelberry envisions a growing progression where the first treatment facility is set up through the funding of crypto investors, which will, in turn, generate earnings and intellectual property that will help inform the next treatment facility, and so on.
Breaking It Down Further – How It Works
The mission of WaterChain’s decentralized water funding platform is to fund the next generation of water treatment projects around the world with a dedicated organization, or project management company, to select and manage the treatment facility projects.
To maximize speed and profitability, WaterChain will team with only the most advanced, modular, real-time, internet-enabled treatment systems.
In fact, there are cloud-enabled device manufacturers who make water treatment systems that are ready to be dropped into the ground and put to work.
Through the coin offering process, investors purchase WaterChain tokens to invest in projects and share in the profits generated. Within these treatment systems, sensors trigger instant payments to the participants, generating a continuous stream of income for WaterChain. Over time, the hope is that the WaterChain asset base will expand and become sustainable.
Eckelberry in acknowledging the power of crypto funding and blockchain technology states: “where the people who fund it are every person in the world who cares about water quality and supply, offering the world an opportunity to influence and participate directly in water treatment systems.”
