Can a crypto save Pasig River?

A group of entrepreneurs want to apply cryptocurrencies and modern technologies to allow children to swim and play again along the Pasig. AFP River. AFP

Throughout the Philippines history, the Pasig River was an important source of water, food, transportation and livelihood for many Filipinos living along the river shores. The significance of the river is evidenced by the fact that the official residence of the country’s president, the Malacañan Palace is located there. Pasig River used to be a place where the Manila’s rich live.

Since the Spanish time, the Pasig River provides a lifeline for most Filipinos. It was also a place for gathering, bathing, fishing, washing clothes, swimming and many other recreational activities.

But the rich no longer lives along Pasig River. Its shores were taken over by factories and squatter colonies. This suffocated the river with garbage, chemical deposits, silts and plastics. The garbage situation along the river worsened through the years that even its tributaries can no longer sustain aquatic life. The river has long been dead.

Several initiatives have been undertaken by past administrations to rehabilitate Pasig River, but none had provided solid results.

The Duterte administration, through the Pasig River Rehabilitation Commission (PRRC) knew that cleaning the river requires a holistic approach that should also include rehabilitating the Laguna Lake and Manila Bay. It also requires lots of money and new technologies.

Filipino entrepreneur and environmentalist Mariano Jose Diaz Villafuerte IV, CEO of CypherOdin Inc. and cryptocurrency BOTcoin, has partnered with the PRRC to provide the technology, know-how, information and data base on how to best rehabilitate Pasig River. It is his dream to clean up the world’s rivers and seas with blockchain a distributed ledger platform.

Villafuerte has identified the 27-kilometer long Pasig River, as his firm’s first proof of concept (PoC). The river is one of the dirtiest and most heavily polluted rivers of the Philippines.

“We first came up with the idea of showcasing how blockchain technology can solve real world problems and clean up the environment specifically, using Boracay Island (a world famous tourist resort island in central Philippines) as an example. However, the government shut the island down in April, so we looked at the Pasig River instead as the next most important body of water in the country,” Villafuerte said.

Currently, CypherOdin is looking for collaborators along with government agencies, including PRRC to implement the project. But more importantly, he said his company is offering its services to the government for free.

He explained how his company plans to install internet of things (IoT) devices on the river and underwater (IOUT) to monitor water quality or tide levels and other relevant data to track and monitor their progress in real time. This will enable them to generate and analyse the data produced that will serve to create the impact they are looking for towards solving the plastic and garbage problem that silts the river.

For even more utility, he said CypherOdin would be using drones to map the plastic using LIDAR on a microscopic level. “We will collect all the data we gather from these IoT and process them so we will have comprehensive information on where the plastics and garbage are coming from, how they are moving, among others. This would allow us to analyze and come up with recommendations on how to best clean up the rivers of this debris,” he added.

But as part of its holistic approach, Villafuerte said the company also plans to launch a massive information drive, particularly to communities along the riverbanks and near the river about the importance of proper garbage disposal and how to protect the environment.

The communities, he said, would be incentivized with BOTcoin cryptocurrency for a certain amount of garbage they collected on the river and for not throwing plastics on it. BOTcoin is the first digital currency which aims to create a world free of waste and restored to its pristine state.

“This would encourage the community also to respect the river because they will be earning something from it,” Villafuerte added.

Villafuerte said the information, analysis, and findings of their research could be used to clean up other dirty rivers across the world like the Ganges River in India, the Amazon in Brazil and Yangtze in China, among others.

“This is blockchain as a service and data as a service,” Villafuerte said because by then, the information will be highly sought after.