Dharmveer Singh, a tech entrepreneur from India, has been at the forefront of using blockchain since 2015. In fact he dropped out of college to follow his passion. My last interaction with him was to develop a blockchain solution for fresh food importers to enhance traceability in the food supply chain. During the conversation, he had mentioned about the use case of reducing SMS spam. The story stayed with me, until I decided to shut down Zaloom and start writing on web3.
I have known Dharmveer since our college days. Dharmveer’s journey began in 2015 when he was inspired by the peer-to-peer payment system and the Reserve Bank of India's (RBI) whitepaper on the Unified Payment Interface (UPI). He got motivated to build a peer to peer money transfer platform for Indian consumers. Paytm, the major P2P money transfer platform now, was only into mobile recharges then and a white space in P2P lending and transfer existed. To move forward he needed a license, which required a significant investment. Despite efforts, he couldn’t raise enough funds and moved on to other ideas. In 2016, Dharmveer was selected by Accel Partners for their accelerator program in Bangalore, where he worked on a peer-to-peer lending platform that leveraged blockchain. They received significant lending commitments. The traction far exceeded the expectations. They exited the company and moved to Gurgaon for their next adventure.
He spent the next three years working on consulting projects related to blockchain and crypto tech. Fun fact - they were making upto 15 crypto applications every day for the clients. This helped them bootstrap.
In 2018, crypto markets and freelance work on crypto dried up. At the same time, TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) came out with a request to develop a platform to solve India's massive SMS spamming problem using “innovative technologies such as blockchain”.
This caught Dharmveer’s attention, and with his team of innovators they submitted their solution in just 15 days. The solution leveraged blockchain to prevent SMS led spams and fraud. The solution was a hit with regulators and telco companies, and Dharmveer signed his first ever contract in the Telecom business with QTL & VMIPL (earlier known as Videocon) in 2019, followed by few other telecom service providers.
The solution involved creating a permission-based single shared ledger that all operators agreed on, simplifying the regulation, and establishing a scrubbing engine that prevented spamming. The engine worked on 48 parameters for every message, and any message that failed to match these parameters was rejected. This reduced spams by almost 80%. The remaining spam happens due to leakages at the aggregator level.
His contribution has received recognition for being the country’s largest Blockchain implementation in the telecom sector and has come to be popularly known as the TCCCPR compliance.
A quick snapshot of SMS value chain:
Dharmveer mentioned few other use cases
In International roaming to build audit trails and reduce reconciliation time. Current players often disagree on billing as everyone follows their own ledger leading to long reconciliation cycles.
In stock exchanges to ensure proper audit trail and prevent manipulation of data. SEBI has recently issued operational guidelines for “Security and Covenant Monitoring using Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT)”.
I also questioned if current and older technologies could have solved the problem as well. He clarified that the best alternative solution was Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), which has been in existence since 2000. However, data immutability is better solved in blockchain based ledger.
Dharmveer's journey and innovative use of blockchain in SMS communication are inspiring examples of how technology can solve real-world problems. As digital infrastructure continues to grow, blockchain's potential applications in SMS communication will only increase, and it will be exciting to see how entrepreneurs leverage it to create more value.