5ire to hire ex-govt officials, C-level execs

The company will allocate the funds into four buckets including research and to strengthen its technology infrastructure, chief executive Pratik Gauri said in an interview.

The unicorn currently has about 65 developers in-house, besides 50-60 consultants under chief technology officer, Dhanraj Dadhich, based in Mohali, he said.

“We’re going to add more people in our technology teams,” said Gauri.

By hiring C-level executives and retired government officials, 5ire aims to make deeper forays into corporations and governments. It has a total of 10 stakeholders currently, including government agencies and corporations, who are testing its upcoming 5ireChain blockchain. This includes consumer electronics firm Intex, men’s personal care firm Vi-John, Muzaffarnagar police in Uttar Pradesh and the Nebraska police in the US.

“About 10 stakeholders are already testing the product and we plan to go from 10 to 100 large stakeholders apart from developer adoption,” Gauri said. “They (the early stakeholders) are mostly going to be validators, but they’re testing multiple use-cases. With Eagle Hunters (a manpower services company), we’re testing an employee records use-case, where all of their 120,000 employees will go on the blockchain. Once we test with them, we want to go directly to the railway ministry, for instance,” he said.

5ire mainnet, the blockchain network that is part of the company’s core product offering, is set for launch in November. The company has built on top of the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism used by platforms such Solana, Cardano, and Ethereum, it said. The company plans to provide this to stakeholders for decentralized storage, healthcare, telecom networks and more.

Its key offering is a new “proof-of-benefit” mechanism that it has built on top of the PoS system, it said.

PoS is a comparatively new consensus mechanism used to validate entries into distributed blockchain-based databases. The older proof-of-work system invited all miners on a network to validate a transaction and rewarded the one who was the fastest. In PoS, miners are invited to stake their own tokens on the network and only the top stakers are allowed to validate a transaction, thus reducing the overall computing power needed to validate each transaction. A variation of PoS is called nominated proof-of-stake (NPoS), which is used by networks such as Polkadot. This adds a set of nominators to the network who select the validators.

According to 5ire, its new proof-of-benefit system is stacked on top of the traditional NPoS mechanism.

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