From Shipwrecks to New Channels: How I Use Blockchain to Reshape the Future

Editor's Note:@hmalviya9 recalled how he was inspired by his friend Rish from Google and MIT to create the blockchain platform Itsblockchain.com, and combined it with the digital Gorka to build a global digital identity system. When communicating with team members Mehul and Jeet, they found that they had difficulty understanding the potential of blockchain. Faced with heavy debts and a team that could not see the future, the author decided to leave the old project and pursue blockchain opportunities, and finally chose to let go of the past and focus on building a bigger future. Blockchain became his new mission.

The following is the original content (the original content has been reorganized for easier reading and understanding):

I turned to the teacher who has always helped me understand the valuable things in the future-my teacher is Google.

Google is more than a search engine — it’s the greatest teacher for anyone curious enough to know how to ask questions. If you know how to ask them, Google can open doors for you that the traditional education system doesn’t even know exist.

And you only ask real questions when you’re truly driven by a problem you want to solve. Not to pass a test, not to show off, but to actually solve that problem that keeps you up at night.

The problem I want to solve is simple, yet hard — how do I find a technological moat for Digital Gorka?

Not just a feature or a product, but a defensive layer that is strong enough to make investors excited about us and willing to fund us even if they see our messy equity structure.

I understand the game - they are all here to make money, not charity. But if I can show them the future we are building - a future that only we can achieve - then that ugly equity structure will become like a small dent in a Ferrari.

For weeks, I had been working day and night to improve the digital Golkar product. I wasn’t sitting around waiting for miracles to happen — I was making calls, writing emails, tracking down potential clients. I had managed to find two teams that had developed crazy technologies in the field of mobile biometrics.

One ​​of them had even filed a patent that allowed mobile phones to scan thumbs and irises — technology that was once only possible with expensive equipment at UIDAI’s AADHAR registration drives.

The deal I had sealed meant that we could now deploy the same biometric capabilities globally at a much lower cost — no bulky equipment, no long queues at the centres. Just the smartphone in your hand.

That’s when the true vision for Digital Gorka began to take shape in my mind:

“What if we could create a universal identity system — like AADHAR — but for the entire internet?”

Instead of physical hubs, we would have 10,000 DG devices around the world, creating a million new digital identities per year for real people, secure and globally portable. This would be a new layer for the internet — a real, verifiable digital identity.

That’s when I realized: Digital Gorka was more than just a visitor management system. It could be a global platform for creating internet identities.

As the vision became clear, the struggle was just as brutal. I sent hundreds of emails a week, trying to build partnerships across continents. Through this effort, I landed potential customers in Mexico and Kenya. The teams loved our product idea and were actively pitching to local customers. In theory, our sales pipeline was building. But to scale this business to the next stage, I needed one thing — money.

And to attract real money, we needed not only a product, but a vision backed by technology that could not be easily replicated by others. So I turned to my teacher — Google — again and asked a bigger question: “How to build the world’s most secure global identity system?”

At this point, Google whispered back to me the answer — blockchain.

As I started digging deeper into blockchain, I had a sense of déjà vu. That weird feeling, like I already knew this thing.

Then, all of a sudden, it clicked — Bitcoin.

I thought back to my college days, when we used to frantically try out various things with Alienware laptops in our small apartment in Jalandhar.

At that time, my friend helped me mine a few bitcoins, and bitcoin was very cheap at that time, almost worthless.

But in the same period, I suffered serious losses from a scam called Liberty Reserve, and I stupidly thought that Bitcoin was also a scam, so I gave up without hesitation.

The last I saw the price of Bitcoin was $50, and now, when I checked again, it has risen to $400.

I sat there, staring at the screen, and began to blame myself for not being curious enough. If I had just trusted my instincts and learned more, my life might be completely different now.

But this regret only lasted a few minutes.

Because soon I realized - "This time, you are still early."

I realized that blockchain is still in its early stages, and this is the moment for me to get ahead again and seize the opportunity - just like the hacker era, like the early blogs, like every wave I caught before.

Being one step ahead and learning something that the world will not realize until a few years later seems to have become part of my genes.

I know that the best way to master a technology is to learn and share it.

Because when you teach others, you will learn better yourself, ten times better.

I wasted no time, opened GoDaddy, and started looking for a domain name that included the word "blockchain". After an hour of searching, I found it - Itsblockchain.com

I immediately reserved the domain, created Twitter and Facebook pages, and decided: I will start writing about everything I learn.

Not as a professional blogger, but as a curious person sharing what he is figuring out - share it with the world.

At the same time, I knew I needed technical prowess to actually implement blockchain integration within Digital Golkar. So, I called up Rish, an old friend of mine who was studying at MIT at the time — probably the smartest brain I had access to at the time.

When I pitched the idea to him, he was instantly excited. We decided not only to write about blockchain, but also to co-found Itsblockchain.com together and start building a global blockchain community in India — all this at a time when others didn’t even understand what blockchain actually meant.

Rish also helped me a lot on the technical side. He tailored a detailed architecture of a universal identity system based on blockchain for our product. I quickly applied it to the presentation I prepared for new investors. Now, when I pitched the digital Golka, it was no longer just a boring visitor management system - it was a gateway to a global digital identity secured by blockchain.

Everything started to make sense - except for the people around me.

Mehul and Jeet simply didn’t understand. They were still stuck in the franchise model and local transaction mindset. To them, blockchain was just “extra work” — not a transformative opportunity.

I tried to explain: “We already record verified visitor data every day. Add biometrics and we have a real opportunity to build a decentralized identity network!” But it was like explaining the Internet to people who were still stuck in the era of fax machines.

It wasn’t their fault either. In 2016, blockchain was really too early. Most people hadn’t even heard of it. Even fewer could understand how it would change the Internet forever. In those depressing moments, I realized something powerful — I was already on a sinking ship.

We were weighed down by a debt of Rs. 5 lakh. A team with no future in sight.

And, it was only 2 months before everything collapsed.

I was faced with a choice: stay on the sinking ship out of loyalty, or start building a new ship to welcome the person I was becoming - the person who was ready to create something greater than myself.

As I looked deep within myself, the answer became clear: blockchain was now my calling.

I had to move on. I had to leave the old mess behind and invest everything into building a future where I would never miss an opportunity out of fear or ignorance again.