Water and the blockchain

Cities Without Water 🏜️

Science fiction 🔮 has long imagined a future where water becomes a more valuable commodity than oil.

After a multi-year drought, Cape Town may be the first major modern city in the world to run out of water.

Cape Town is not the first city to face water scarcity. Already, Barcelona came close to turning off its taps in 2008, and both Jakarta and Sao Paulo, are having water issues.

According to the United Nations[1], one quarter of the world’s population now faces water shortages.

Can new experiments in blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLT) help us to create more efficient ways to harness and fairly distribute life’s most precious resource? 💧

Smarter Cities 🌆

There are a bunch of blockchain initiatives working on harnessing blockchain for water projects:

• ⚡️Power Ledger, who are trialling a project in the Australian city of Freemantle to develop low-cost water capture and treatment systems throughout the city, that use big data and DLT to automatically trade water through these systems.
• 🤝The Australian Water Partnership, who recently collaborated with Civic Ledger to research other blockchain solutions for the governmental water market. As the government moves towards water market trading as a solution to water scarcity, smart contract platforms like ‘ETHEREUM’ Ethereum could become a means to provide greater transparency and liquidity (excuse the pun) to tradable water rights.
• 🚰The Genesis Research and Technology Group, are creating a trackable water supply built on Ethereum that will monitor water quality and automatically alert authorities if it drops.

Going Off the Grid, One Iota at a Time ⛺

Cryptocurrencies like ‘IOTA’ are well positioned for trading water as a commodity. Designed specifically for the Internet of Things , IOTA allows autonomous, machine-to-machine micropayments with no transaction fees.

IOTA could ensure that you pay for your usage as your tank refills, and all of this would be so seamless that we wouldn’t even realise when we were doing it.

Rather than relying on a government to purify and transport water from far away, imagine having a water tank in your garden that automatically refills itself based on your usage, directly from a neighbour who has collected excess.

The future 🔮

The world has already seen a number of similar peer-to-peer micro-grid projects for energy trading. Experiments like the Brooklyn Microgrid and GridPlus show us how DLT can democratize formerly centralised systems, and ultimately make them more resilient in the face of challenges on a scale the water has never had to face before.