MAY 2023 | EARTHFUND PLATFORM UPDATE
An in-depth preview of EarthFund 2.0, our new AI-powered community launchpad
Get a detailed look at our progress on EarthFund 2.0 with AI-powered community creation, cleaner UI and improved functionality.
👋 We’re EarthFund, the decentralized platform using blockchain, decentralization, AI, and crypto to revolutionize the giving economy and give you more of a voice in the shape of tomorrow.
This is our May 2023 update, giving you an in-depth preview of all the new features, functionality and upgrades we’re making to the EarthFund platform.
Happy May, Earthlings 🌍
Since our last update, our product team has been hard at work behind the scenes completely reinventing the EarthFund platform so that it’s easier to set up a community, raise money, interact with other Earthlings, promote communities, and send grants to the projects that are going to make a difference.
This is going to be an absolute monster of an update, so we’ll jump straight in…
Big update #1: AI-powered community creation to make it easier than ever to get started
Last month, we talked about the hurdles that users currently face when setting up decentralized communities. Things like designing a token, writing a manifesto, choosing a name, etc… all throw a wrench into a process that should be exciting and simple.
So this month, we got to work fixing them.
Now, when you set up a community on EarthFund, you’ll get an AI assistant helping you with every element of the process.
Of course, you still have creative control and the final say on everything. You can replace images, edit copy, rename your token, and do everything you could do before.
But you’ll also have a starting point to jump off from.
Here’s why we think that’s going to be huge for becoming the home of decentralized fundraising:
This EarthFund 2.0 has been designed to shift the user out of the creative mindset and into the analytical mindset to get their DAO launched quicker.
If, for example, we asked you to draw a horse, you’d probably panic. You’d be worried about the proportions, the color, the shape, the head, the feet, etc…
If instead, we showed you a drawing of a horse, you could probably see where to color it in, where to tweak mistakes, and how to improve it.
Why is that?
Because it’s much easier for us to spot what doesn’t work, what doesn’t match up with the ideas we have in our heads, and what isn’t quite right than it is to create something from scratch.
New feature: AI-written community overviews and manifestos for you to edit 🔥
Ask anybody to write a community manifesto from scratch and they’ll inevitably see the blank page and freeze.
What should I say?
How do I start this?
Should I reference a study?
Is there a better word?
So we’ve flipped that whole thing on its head.
The EarthFund platform now functions like you’ve got your own marketing team.
We’ve been training OpenAI with prompts and guidelines on creating catchy community names, great headlines, and compelling manifestos that make people want to donate and join your communities.
You tell us your big vision for your community and we’ll get to work with the first draft.
30 seconds later, voila! You’ve got a really solid first draft to tweak, personalize and make your own.
Plus, AI-generated header images that look 🔥.
New feature: AI-powered token designs 🔥
Designing a token or a logo is a blocker not just for decentralized communities, but for start-ups and businesses too.
With our v.1 launch, only the communities that created a token icon were the ones that reached out to our creative team for help. All the others got stuck at this stage.
(That’s completely understandable. Token design is time-consuming and often requires an upfront expense of a designer.)
But with EarthFund 2.0, all you need to do is tell the platform your Big Idea for a community and we’ll use AI to generate a token for you.
Note: AI output is only as good as the prompt, so we’re constantly working on our prompts to make sure the output is always high-quality.
New feature: AI-powered grant suggestions
Finding projects that need funding is another big challenge for fundraising communities.
So, we’ve built AI-powered grant suggestions to get the ball rolling.
Now, when you start a community, the EarthFund platform will find 5 legitimate, verified non-profits from around the world doing work that aligns with your vision.
These will appear as suggested grants in your community for you to approve or remove as you see fit.
That way, if you want to prime the pump for your community to vote on some projects from Day 1, you’re looking for some more projects to fund or you feel like you need an extra hand researching charities, EarthFund is here to help.
New feature: claiming created communities 🤝
With v.1 of EarthFund, we saw lots of great ideas for communities that were started and then never finalized.
And while we’re adding all these new features to tackle that, we also realized something: this wasn’t entirely in the spirit of decentralization.
Ideas and names on the platform aren’t “owned” by individuals. They’re safeguarded and stewarded by the founders, sure. But they’re not “owned”.
So now, after you create a community, you have 24 hours to claim it as a founder.
This makes you and your chosen co-founders the stewards of the community.
But if you don’t claim it, we’ll offer it out to the community to take over.
As such, EarthFund will start to become a sort of marketplace of ideas.
If somebody has an idea and then decides that launching a community is not for them, they can pass the torch to somebody else to continue the journey.
If somebody doesn’t want to edit the homepage or tweak the copy, the community can say “hey, I love that idea, I’ll do it!”.
The whole process becomes more collaborative. It’s not founders and members. It’s whole communities working together to create an ecosystem of great causes that share members, ideas, and common goals.
(More on that later.)
New feature: joining a community waitlist 🔥
Before we launched the EarthFund platform, we created a waitlist of 3000+ people who wanted to launch communities.
This gave us the idea to build waitlist functionality into the communities launched on our platform.
Now, as you build out your community, assemble your team, and work out the finer pre-launch details, you can create a waitlist of people who want to buy tokens the moment it goes live.
And as a community member, you can join a waitlist to get notified (via email and on the platform) when they go live.
This should make the whole platform feel more like an ecosystem rather than siloed communities and make it easier for founders to grow their communities and start making an impact as quickly as possible.
New terminology: from DAOs to decentralized fundraising communities 🤝
You may have noticed that we’re no longer calling these communities DAOs.
There’s a good reason for that.
These communities will still function similarly to a DAO, but by changing the name, automating the reward/grant contract, and removing some of the complexities of DAOs, we’re in the process of doing everything we can to protect founders from the risks and looming uncertainty around the legal status of DAOs, the tax implications and the need to legally register DAOs.
“Creating a DAO without considering the legal and regulatory aspects will introduce you to a litany of potential risks down the line.”
Forbes, Creating Your First DAO Should Not Be So Expensive Or Painful
Big update #2: donate to join a community, AI-supported tokenomics, and improved reward mechanics
As part of the improved 2.0, we’ve also rethought the way that you join a community and create your tokenomics.
Before, you’d buy a token to join the community but the fundraising target was separate.
This created an odd disconnect where donors had no say in how their donations were used unless they bought tokens on top of their donations.
Now, when you join the community, your money goes straight to the fundraising budget to make an impact around the world, creating a community of people that are all committed to making the world a better place.
(And preventing people from joining the community just for the rewards/to speculate on the token. More on that later.)
New feature: governance tokens as a kind of stablecoin 🔥
Now, when a community launches, it’ll set a price for its token (say $1) and its fundraising goal.
This token price won’t increase or decrease depending on demand, but will instead function like a stablecoin.
For every token you have, you have one vote towards which grants get funded and your money goes directly towards funding those grants.
It’s clean. It’s simple. And it’s more in line with our move from tokens as speculation to tokens as a utility.
(It also helps protect these community tokens from the rumored legislation from around the world against speculating on crypto tokens.)
New feature: AI-powered tokenomics set-up 🔥
Our AI doesn’t just help you set up your token icon, it also helps you get a grip on your tokenomics from Day 1.
For example, when you’re setting up your community, our trained AI can help suggest a fundraising total and a number of tokens to mint.
To demonstrate, we asked our platform to help us create a community to protect coral reefs.
When it got to token creation, it told us “There are 8,000 coral reefs around the world that need protection, so it’s a good idea to mint 800,000 tokens at $1 each to raise $10,000 for each coral reef.”
New feature: participation-based rewards 🔥
In v.1 of EarthFund, the rewards mechanic was a complicated mechanic that we had to create and engineer from scratch.
Essentially, the contract needs to create a waiting list on-chain, wait for approval of the vote, hold the grants in a queue, check when votes pass, and then divide the grant up into rewards and the grant to the project.
At that stage, the simplest way to launch v.1 was to reward anybody who had the token every time a grant was paid out to a project.
However, we always knew there was a more elegant solution when we had the bandwidth to tackle it: participation-based rewards.
Now, every time a grant is funded, you’ll be rewarded a pro-rata share of the rewards based on your participation in the vote.
If you donate to join the community but don’t participate, you don’t get rewarded.
But the more tokens you use to vote, the more of a share of the reward you get. (This incentivizes more donations to the community, too.)
So, for example, let’s say there are 10,000 votes on a grant of $20,000. 1000 of those votes were yours and the community rewards are 10%. You’ve earned $200 for your participation in this voting and you’ve made the world a better place.
Note: all voting counts as participation whether you vote yes or no.
Big update #3: Product Hunt-style leaderboard for community-powered promotion with 1Earth
We always loved the idea of the EarthFund community deciding which communities get promoted and more visibility.
So, we’ve built a leaderboard into the platform that lets you use your 1Earth vote every week on which communities get featured at the top of the EarthFund homepage, on social media (followed by a fair few influential accounts), and featured in a “Community of the Week” email sent out to our list of almost 4000 followers.
Like all votes on the platform and in the communities, this will run Monday to Sunday and the winner will be featured the following week.
(It’s not just about first place, though. The second and third-place runners-up will be featured on the grants page and also get a mention on social media.)
New feature: community leaderboard with 1Earth voting 🚀
Every week, you’ll be able to use your 1Earth to upvote communities in the global leaderboard to get featured on the website and across our marketing in the following week.
We know that growing and promoting a community is hard, so we hope that not only will this feature give you the power to decide which communities are worthy of being celebrated and promoted, but bring visibility to new communities and catch the eyeballs of potential new members.
(And with the donate-to-join functionality, new members = more donations.)
New feature: comments and liking on communities đź‘Ť
Another feature to consolidate the community as the beating heart of the platform is the new like and comment functionality.
Now, when any community goes live you can either:
👍 Like: liking a community adds it to your watchlist so you can keep a list of communities you want to join in the future. (It also helps show support to communities you like but can’t join right now.)
💬 Comment: just like on social media, you can comment on a community to show your support or give them feedback on their direction, even if you’re not a member of the community. This also gives community members a place to discuss the community with potential new members in public.
(You’ll also be able to use Discord for this, but more on that later.)
Big update #4: Social network functionality and Discord communities
But liking and commenting is not the only improvement we’re making to put community at the heart of the platform. We’re also adding some social media-style functionality to make EarthFund your go-to home for making change happen.
(With none of the icky privacy-invading stuff, of course.)
That means:
- A customizable EarthFund profile for every account
- The ability to like and follow other Earthlings
- The ability to get notified when a friend joins another community
- Badges to celebrate your participation and encourage participation
- A history of everybody’s votes and donations to keep everything transparent
- Privacy features to control what everyone can see
- Wallet functionality to add a new wallet to your account
Improved feature: Discord bot to chat with communities and pre-launch communities 🔥
Our WIP Discord bot has been getting a rework too.
v.1 of the bot could verify token holders to prevent scammers and spammers from joining the community’s channel.
v.2 can still do that, but it also automatically creates a Discord channel on the EarthFund server when a community is launched with a #prelaunch channel that anybody can join to chat with the community, suggest ideas, or volunteer as a co-founder.
This way, we can make sure that the community-specific channels — where you can talk about projects, fundraising, etc… safely — remain safe from scammers and spammers while also giving communities the space to chat to people that are perhaps on the fence about joining or have more questions.
Big update #5: improved grant proposals and grant claiming
Last month, we said that one of our April to-do tasks was:
Continue to optimize the grant claiming process → currently, we know that claiming a grant is fairly gas-heavy for the recipient. We’re working on creating an oracle that reduces the gas significantly.
Well, we have good news.
We’ve managed to reduce the claiming process from 3 steps to a one-click claim.
That means that any recipient of a grant only needs to pay gas once to withdraw the grant.
We’ve done this by creating an oracle that automatically handles 2 of the 3 steps and covers the fee out of the EarthFund operations budget, completely streamlining the process for grant recipients and taking another big step towards getting EarthFund mass adoption-ready.
Improved feature: better grant proposals
Another big improvement we’ve made is to the grant proposal project. Previously, suggesting a grant didn’t just require you to explain why you thought the grant deserved approval from the community, but establishing trust in the organization too.
Now, we’ve built a proposal system that does this for you.
All you need to do is enter the URL of the recipient project and the platform will verify the URL, give it a verified tick, create a brief overview of the organization and add links to their social media and website to your proposal.
All you need to do is focus on creating a compelling proposal and away you go!
Improved feature: inviting grant recipients with personalized messages
Another area we’ve improved is the way that grants are sent to organizations.
Finding organizations that accept crypto donations or have a wallet is still a bit of a barrier while we work toward mass adoption.
To address this, we’re integrating with hunter.io to pull verified email addresses of people that work at the organizations you’re suggesting for a grant.
That means that before your grant goes up for a vote, you can email verified addresses from the organization and ask them to claim the grant with a verified address.
You’ll be able to add a personal message and we’ll send them an email from EarthFund with all the information they need to trust the platform and sign up.
As soon as somebody from the organization claims it, the grant proposal will go up for a community vote.
TLDR: EarthFund is entering into the next phase of our growth as a more feature-rich platform
As we’re nearly 3,000 words into this monster of an update we’re going to wrap things up quickly.
Here’s the TLDR: EarthFund 2.0 is staying true to our original mission and vision of the platform — to be the home of decentralized fundraising and doing good — while also embracing new technology that doesn’t just help you launch and run a community, but that brings people and organizations together to change the world and create an online community for change.
We’re all incredibly bullish about what the future has in store.
This month, we’re going to stay head-down on working to get these new changes live”. In the next update, we’ll have an ETA on when you can see these changes live, more info on the EarthFund-sponsored grants we mentioned, and even more detail on the improved platform.
Until then, help us spread the word about what’s coming by liking this article, sharing it on social and asking us questions in the community.
Let’s build a better tomorrow, together. 🌍
Help us spread the word
- Make some noise about our AI update on social media! 🔥
- Leave a positive comment on KuCoin’s new comment functionality
- Follow us on Twitter and give our posts a like/retweet → this would be huge for us. Our Twitter profile is key to spreading the word beyond crypto and into the kind of spaces where future DAO members (and maybe even founders) hang out.
- Join our Telegram community (if you’re not a member already)
- Talk about EarthFund in EarthFund-adjacent spaces (maybe mental health communities or carbon/climate change communities on Twitter)
- Tweet about EarthFund or interact with us on social media (got to feed those social media algorithms!)
- Ask us questions — we’re always available to answer questions in Telegram. (And if our community team doesn’t have the answers, we’ll get them for you.)
- Leave a positive comment and bullish rating on CoinMarketCap
- Like 1Earth on CoinGecko
Until next week, a massive thanks for being part of this journey with us!
Let’s build a better tomorrow, together.
New to EarthFund? Here’s everything you need to know 👇
Start a world-changing community with its own token.
Join a community of like-minded people.
Donate crypto to change the world.
All from one place.
EarthFund takes the power of centralized organizations like governments and global charities and gives it to communities dedicated to causes.
It allows everyday people like you to affect change. And using crypto and the blockchain, it lets you have a voice in decisions and fund the causes you believe in.
Powering it all is the 1Earth token, an ERC-20 token that can be staked in exchange for governance tokens that give you a voice on the platform.
By buying the token and joining the EarthFund DAO, anybody in the world will have a vote on how the EarthFund treasury is used to fund planet-saving projects around the world.
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