Singapore-based Earth Dollar CEO Gurminder Singh, says the word ‘currency’ means current energy. According to Singh, Fiat currency is an old energy that is no longer suited to the temper of our age. We spent an afternoon with a delightfully eccentric, yet brilliant Singh, who says their gargantuan journey to codify ethics into crypto-currency for the common good is an imperative for survival.
By Joanne Leila Smith
When Gurminder Singh was 19 years old, he was enlisted into National Service in Singapore and soon after was deployed to Borneo, home to some of the oldest living rainforests in the world and the largest island in Asia. This experience, says Singh, had a profound and lasting impact on how he perceived himself and his role in the world.
“I came back home upset. I knew something had changed in me. My mum asked me ‘why?’ and I explained that I had walked through this beautiful valley, full of flowers and trees and the lively sounds of the jungle and three weeks later, when I returned to the same place, it was desolate. Everything had been cut down as far as my eyes could see. There was just silence. I felt as if some part of me had been chopped off. I had no idea about environmentalism as a young man, but it sparked a deep desire to do something for this planet,” says Singh.
According to Singh, now in his sixties, that desire was not fulfilled in a strategic way, but rather, a combination of events, perhaps synchronicity, led one thing to another, to where Singh is today.
Singh’s late uncle, famously known as Yogi Bhajan, changed his name legally to Harbhajan Singh Khalsa Yogiji when he became a United States Citizen in 1976. According to Singh, his uncle was his major mentor and confidante until his passing in 2004.
“My uncle introduced me to Greenpeace in 1976. I was always trying to do something for the environment, but at the time, Singapore was still developing. My family wanted me to be a doctor or engineer, and I wanted to do IT. So I completed a Diploma in Computer Studies in Singapore.
My uncle introduced Kundalini yoga to the West in 1969. The early westerners who became Sikhs and yoga teachers were his students originally. When he came to Singapore in 1983, he invited me to go to the US to live with him, so I moved to Los Angeles in 1987,” says Singh.
After three decades of living abroad, Singh has developed a network of ‘green-conscious’ movers and shakers including celebrities Leonardo De Caprio, the late Michael Jackson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, to Dr. Ashok Khosla of the Development Alternatives Group and the Club of Rome.
“I didn’t get up one morning and say I’m going to create a green carpet event or found the Green Institute. It just came about. One thing led to another, and I ended up going into private equity to help fund renewable energy projects. I didn’t plan my career, or how it mapped out! I went to UCLA once, and all these students wanted my autograph, and I asked ‘why?’ They said, ‘Because you’re the Green Guru’. I thought, that’s a good name. I didn’t even pick that nickname for myself! laughs Singh. “The thing is, there is a lot of green washing, which is a big reason for why I do what I do. I try my best to change that”.
Early in his career, Singh was the Chief Architect in developing the Self-Adaptive Intelligent Network Technologies framework in 1998, which was used for distributed datacentre operations and is now modified for multi-dimensional blockchain integration, QoS and protocol management. In 2007, Gurminder co-founded Transformative Capital Inc., a strategic technology and financial advisory firm providing capital formation services.
Singh is also the Founder and Chairman of the International Green Technology Institute since 2003. It has launched various programs such as the Roundtable of Green Thought Leaders, Green Awards, Green Technology Leadership Lecture Series, the Green Technology Entrepreneurial Forum, and the Green Technology Global Expo.
“I launched the first Global Green’s Annual Pre-Oscar Party in 2005. I was terrified and thought, nobody is going to show up…That evening, almost everyone in Hollywood was there. I guess the timing was right,” says Singh.
Over the past decade, Singh has been an adviser in renewable energy, blockchain and digital currencies to New Generation Power in Chicago and StealthGrid. He is an Executive Director of GreenEdge Global, and adviser to CyberNorth Ventures, a Canadian Fund Manager and their Cayman Islands-based Crypto Development Fund since 2016.
For Singh, who identifies as a practising Sikh, true success is not measured by wealth, but legacy.
“Why do we have a connection to the natural world? I was 30-years-old when I understood it for the first time. I was educated about my religion through doctrine, but I never really understood that at the heart of my religiosity meant just to connect. I realised in a deep way, that every little thing is created by our Creator. We humans have only created opinions, which we then dispute over. Man-made stupidity. Once I realised this, I thought a lot about my role in the world. When we think about the aspiration, ‘being successful’ well what kind of success are we talking about when the planet is being destroyed? What’s the point in owning a Lamborghini if you can’t drive it more than five miles an hour in the city? There is a collective madness here… One billion or more people may lose their homes because of climate change in this century and we waste our time arguing about semantics,” says Singh.
After 25 years of living in the West, Singh believes all his experience has now lead him to unifying point, the Earth Dollar project.
To say that the Earth Dollar proposition is a grand, unprecedented and ambitious idea, is an understatement.
The Earth Dollar claims to be the world’s first cryptocurrency with an “intrinsic value”, backed by Natural Capital Assets. Singh says Earth Dollar is being developed in alignment with the United Nations 17 Global Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 2030. These goals cover a broad range of social and economic development issues, which include poverty, hunger, health, education, climate change, water, sanitation, energy, environment and social justice.
Earth Dollar is an asset-based community currency that proposes to power a new economic system, called the Living Economic System built on the blockchain. Earth Dollar proposes to combine the Natural Capital Accounting System (NCAS) with blockchain technology, which is a series of inter-linked and interconnected blockchains to track the revitalization of the Natural Capital Assets. According to Singh, NCAS takes a more wholistic look at a countries wealth beyond GDP. GDP is effectively a measure of income and output, whereas natural accounting takes into the context of where the resources come from and whether the extraction and processing of resources is sustainable.
To use a banking metaphor, the bank would not give a million-dollar mortgage to someone who is five years off retirement. So, the NCAS looks at a country’s ability to produce an income and GDP sustainably – i.e. the economic value includes the long-term ability to sustain the current GDP output and valuations of natural reserves. This is especially relevant in timber production, water, farming, energy production etc.
For those interested in determining how natural capital assets are valued, you may like to review an independent study undertaken by Earth Economics in the State of Washington. This study spans the US east coast of New York to Connecticut called the Long Island Sound Basin, which is the basis of Earth Dollar’s upcoming independent study of 18 million hectares owned by the 5 Canadian First Nations.
In summary, if the natural capital that generates this annual benefit were treated as a short-lived economic asset, the asset value of the Long Island Sound Basin would be between USD 690 billion and USD 1.3 trillion (4% discount rate over 100 years)...
...to read more, visit https://indvstrvs.com/gurminder-singh/