The Future Is Now: Sukhveer Sanghera Of Earth Wallet On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The Tech Scene

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Keep your focus on balance. For example, if you feel immense excitement about something, then balance it with calm thoughts. If you get lucky on an investment, then rebalance your portfolio. Extremities will bring chaos, while balance will bring peace. Trusting this can maximize your enjoyment of life over the long run.

As a part of our series about cutting-edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Sukhveer Sanghera.

Sanghera is from Oakville, Canada, studied aerospace engineering in university, and spent his early career doing renewable energy research for minimum wage. It became very clear to Sanghera during this time that the incentives for the smartest people to work on real problems were not correct. Academics who dedicate their lives to researching and pushing humanity forward with real science and innovation, were being made to jump through hoops for government funding, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley executives were literally printing money off false advertising.

Sanghera decided to leave his master’s program to go into this world and try to understand how it works, and in the process helped build a dozen tech startups as the CTO across a range of industries. Sanghera helped build systems for TD Securities, Deloitte, NASA Langley, and was an early developer in both Bitcoin, Ethereum, and most recently Polkdadot, Avalanche and the Internet Computer Protocol. When Sanghera turned 30, he decided it was time to use all of his experience and go back to his origins in clean tech, to see how we can use decentralized finance, governance, and media, to shift the scale back in favor of the academics. With this in mind, Sanghera created Earth Wallet.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I was always fascinated by how technology constantly evolved to challenge what we thought was possible. After finishing a degree in aerospace engineering, I started my career writing computational fluid dynamics software to help push the boundaries of renewable energy research. I worked alongside some of the smartest, most focused, and dedicated people in the world to help create a more abundant future by bringing the cost of clean energy down.

Though it seemed obvious to me that people would want to invest in this future, I was making minimum wage, and the research funding model was structured in a manner that required you to jump through hoops for limited government funding. On the other hand, you’d see Silicon Valley companies building chat apps funded by Wall Street for billions of dollars with what seemed to be an infinite river of cash. So, I decided to find out how our society got to such a place.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?

One day, my friends and I decided to try for the Lunar X Prize and see if launching rockets from high altitude balloons could be a feasible low cost way to reach the moon. We decided to add a GoPro to the payload, which recorded the entire ascent up to an altitude of 150,000 ft., just to see what it looked like from up there and make some cool content. With a few hundred dollars and a couple of days of planning, we managed to capture footage of Earth from space. I think it really made us realize how deeply connected we all are.

In the world of technology entrepreneurship, this experience widened my perspective. It pushed me to create a new weather balloon monitoring system for NASA, learn how our entire global banking infrastructure runs on cobalt mainframes at a major global bank, build automated auditing software for a major financial auditing firm, and join the Wild Wild West of the blockchain industry. After helping develop open source code around new blockchain protocols like Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, Polkdadot, Avalanche, etc., I was blessed to witness the growth of a trillion dollar industry from scratch.

Can you tell us about the cutting-edge technological breakthroughs that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?

Earth Wallet is using decentralized finance, media, and governance to create new incentives for solving climate change. The way I see it, blockchains are an open source software upgrade to the world’s financial system which is meant to allocate capital to fighting problems humanity is facing. Every individual will be affected if the planet becomes uninhabitable. We’re simply giving people the tools they need to take control of their future, rather than yelling at the sky or throwing tomato soup at expensive paintings across the world.

How do you think this might change the world?

There is a saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results, yet we have collectively been trying to solve climate change with the same financial markets and governance systems for half a century now. We need to trust in change. New technology can change the way we allocate capital to climate solutions. There’s both potential and hope in that sentiment.

Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks of this technology that people should think more deeply about?

Yes, S3E1. It is inevitable that financial markets and social networks will merge, as integrating the two makes humanity more efficient at allocating capital to what we deem is important in real time. However, I see many decentralized social network designs that are well suited to the past of capitalists using media to progress their self-interests, which leads to social credit scores applied to individuals. The correct way to do this is to flip the incentives on their head to instead progress our common goals. It is also critical that we do not listen to people saying we must give up our freedoms by banning the self-custody digital assets, which will completely destroy all progress being made in the industry.

Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?

In 2017, I was the CTO at a company building the first Ethereum protocol to tokenize securities onto the blockchain. Regulators back then had no idea what blockchain even was, yet they wanted us to put a backdoor in the code so that they had the power to freeze an individual’s assets. Around the same time, Cambridge Analytica was being exposed as the go-to tool to win the democratic elections, and the power of Facebook and Twitter’s centralized control of billions of people’s data became clear.

I saw this as essentially the same problem/solution. Governments want people to own their own media data, but they also want to control their financial data. In the information age, these are essentially the same thing- just bits of information. Both media and finance are required for self-custody of ‘digital assets.’ You can’t have one without the other.

What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?

Once it becomes more obvious that decentralization can be used to enable humanity to come to a global consensus in near real time, we will see fewer hurdles (especially from regulators). Widespread adoption is critical for us to tackle global issues like climate change. The same is true for democratic elections, which will continue to be rigged as long as we have centralized control of data and AI algorithms incentivized to generate ad revenue for the corporations that run them.

What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?

In a world of cubic zirconia being sold as diamonds, we believe in building quietly. Marketing is a tool that can be used for either good or bad. Our commitment is to bridge the gap between web2 companies and leveraging web3 technology. As such, our partners are not selected based on industry, size, or a founder’s net worth, but rather how scalable their climate solutions are.

Earth Wallet is now available on the iOS, Android, and Chrome stores, and we have launched a new initiative with trees.org to plant a tree for everyone who creates a new account and claims their NFTree seed. Early next year, we will be releasing a new protocol on Ethereum which we hope will bring all the pieces together, so be sure to claim your seed to be eligible for any early adopter rewards.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

The Alexander Hamilton and Satoshi Nakamoto whitepapers, my professors in school, and my mother have had the most impact on me deciding to start Earth Wallet. All three have instilled in me the value of doing things right, instead of doing things fast. This used to be common sense in engineering 100 years ago, but for some reason today, the accepted norm is to ‘build fast and break things’… And yet we wonder why society is shattering around us.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

I think the most important thing is to make sure the next generation does not give up hope that the future will be better. When I was growing up, this was never even a thought. Now when you ask kids, a shocking number of them genuinely believe that the planet they inherit will not be better than the past. If the next generation loses hope, it is one of the worst things that can happen to a society because we quite literally will not have a future at that point. So, I will continue to fight to keep the light of hope illuminated in the world.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?

  1. People appear to come from different places, but we all come from Earth. I’ve been blessed with the freedom to work and live from anywhere and have learned that generally every human is more similar than they are different. We all want the same things. The people who don’t understand this have more often just never left their bubble or are conditioned to believe otherwise by their upbringing.
  2. Keep your focus on balance. For example, if you feel immense excitement about something, then balance it with calm thoughts. If you get lucky on an investment, then rebalance your portfolio. Extremities will bring chaos, while balance will bring peace. Trusting this can maximize your enjoyment of life over the long run.
  3. In an infinite game, the only constant is change. Many people strive for perfection or a specific achievement only to finish and be left unfulfilled. This is because the universe does not play zero sum games- Only humans do.
  4. The media is run by capitalists, not the working class. There is a fairly large dissonance between the truth and what the working class is made to believe by marketers and advertisers who understand how to sell a click and a like. Always seek truth from deeper sources of knowledge like books or elders.
  5. Think first, then build. If you are building systems that could impact the lives of billions of people, please do not move fast and break things. The motto needs to be the complete opposite of what we’ve been doing if we wish to have a positive effect on the world.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

My goal is to make it as easy as possible for everyone to be a part of solving climate change. I think it needs to be as simple as that. You can join the movement today by creating your own Earth Wallet for free.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“Fundamentally, nobody knows anything.” It’s common to feel imposter syndrome, especially when you’re starting out in your career or trying to do something great. But always remember that even the most historic humans breathed the same air you do today, and likely knew just as little as you do about our place in the Universe.

Some very well-known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them 😊

I work for Earth, not VCs. I suggest they start doing the same.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

Instagram: @earthwallet.io

Twitter: @EarthWallet

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.

Thank you!


The Future Is Now: Sukhveer Sanghera Of Earth Wallet On How Their Technological Innovation Will… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Recommended Posts