The problem Aquari solves

Introduction:

Aquari is an on-chain public waste management company that addresses a critical coordination failure in waste management systems across developing regions in the APAC territory. Our platform resolves three key market failures found below.

Public Waste Management System Issues:

Coordination problem: Governments, companies, and local populations in developing countries lack effective systems to divide and incentivize waste management tasks.

Centralized inefficiency: Traditional waste management companies often misallocate government funds that should directly benefit citizens and communities.

Service gaps: Densely populated urban areas, particularly in places like India with large informal settlements, cannot be effectively served by conventional waste management companies.

The Vision

Aquari creates an economic system on the blockchain that leverages token incentives as a means for coordinating human physical labor in the real world and rewards people involved in maintaining clean public spaces. This system allows us to start waste management systems with local employees where communities and governments pay Aquari to operate these services.

Our solution transforms waste management into a decentralized, market-driven gig economy by:

1. Converting volunteers into paid gig-workers through a gamified consumer iOS/Android app.

2. Creating transparent and efficient coordination between governments, private companies, and citizens

3. Enabling governments to allocate waste management funds directly to citizens through our platform. We achieve this by securing government contracts/tenders from municipal city & village governments.

4. Building a decentralized waste management company optimized for serving communities in developing markets with governance via our DAO.

This approach is particularly vital for the APAC region, where rapid urbanization has created significant waste management challenges in densely populated areas where traditional waste collection models fail.

Challenges I ran into

Our biggest challenge came from our own success:

Overwhelming demand from people eager to earn money while helping the environment. When we offered to pay people for cleaning up their communities, the response was tremendous! However, it created significant coordination problems.

Mass participation coordination

Challenge: Managing tens of simultaneous participants across different locations
Solution: Developed a squad-based system with Bluetooth technology that allows phones to communicate directly with each other, enabling efficient coordination and attendance verification and physical presence throughout duration of cleanup.

Ensuring Labor Performance at scale

Challenge: Ensuring cleanup quality across tens of distributed participants when incentive is to do as little work as possible to get paid.
Solution: Turn the work into a team based competition 5v5 or 10v10 where the winning team gets paid 2x wages than the losing team. This rewards high performers and incentivizes workers to police each other if one is slacking as it will cause them financial penalties. An Aquari representative is present at the site in-person to verify work is completed and sign off token rewards to the winning team.

This Base Batch has shown us that the next popular application of tokenization will be the coordination of physical labor to create value.