EarthFund product update 09/12
Big-picture thinking, UX tweaks, and some exciting developments
As we gear up for our investment round, weāve had an opportunity to step back and realize a few more ways that EarthFund will revolutionize the giving economy.
š Weāre EarthFund, the decentralized platform using blockchain, DAOs, and crypto to revolutionize the giving economy and give you more of a voice in the shape of tomorrow.
This is post #11 in our new weekly update on everything that happens behind the scenes at EarthFundās (distributed) HQ.
Want to dive right in?
Ā· An update on our mission and vision
Ā· The four ways weāre revolutionizing the giving economy š¤
Ā· Better donations, clearer messaging, and website tweaks
ā Better donation flows
ā Clearer, cleaner messaging
ā Simpler language to make Web3.0 more accessible
ā Linguistic improvement: Funds are now grants
Ā· Spreading the word about EarthFund
ā Continuing to work with The Chopra Foundation on co-marketing opportunities
ā Promoting EarthFund with Labrys
Ā· How can you help? Help us spread the word
Ā· New to EarthFund? Hereās everything you need to know š
An update on our mission and vision
As weāve geared up for our investment round, weāve had a chance to take a real step back from the granular details of the project and take stock of everything that weāre building.
And in doing that, we realized that we arenāt just building a house of world-changing DAOs that all reward people for making a difference.
Weāre building the infrastructure of a new giving economy built on decentralized decision-making, transparency, and rewarding people for doing good.
2 years ago, CoinTelegraph wrote in their article āThe Future of Philanthropy Lies in Blockchainā that:
By further incorporating both blockchain technology and cryptocurrency donations into the philanthropy sector, we will see various improvements, from the ability to track how a charity is actually using its donations if completed on the blockchain to adding another level of transparency helping to source out corruption.
By implementing systems that depend on blockchain and cryptocurrencies for the completion of philanthropic ventures, we will be able to reduce the fees that are usually associated with international transfers and ultimately provide more immediate financial support to victims of natural disasters or unexpected tragedy. This will also encourage more contributions and more money going to charities, while also allowing for the championing of good actors in the charity space for their transparency.
And what weāre building allows blockchain to finally live up to the promise while also helping on-ramp Web2.0 charities to the new world of decentralized philanthropy.
The four ways weāre revolutionizing the giving economy š¤
1. Building a house of world-changing DAOs.
Weāve talked about this ad nauseum, so weāll make this brief.
Our goal for EarthFund is to become THE platform for people to turn to when they want to start, join or donate to decentralized online communities dedicated to making the world a better place.
Thatās why weāre laser-focused on making sure our platform is as simple and as easy to use as possible. Why? Because simplicity scales. And EarthFund at scale will make the world a better place.
2. A no-code DAO-in-a-box for individuals and non-profits to launch decentralized communities
We didnāt invent DAOs. And companies like DAOhaus, Upstream Collectives and Aragon already offer ways to launch a DAO from one place. So what makes EarthFund different?
Well, for starters, weāre a niche offering. Not niche in the sense that weāre appealing to a small group of people, but niche in that weāre focused only on people who want to do good and make the world a better place.
Most people donāt only care about one issue, so once the platform is full of DAOs doing good, EarthFund will become an ecosystem of users all joining multiple communities, collaborating and doing good, together.
But itās more than that.
Weāre making blockchain accessible to individuals and non-profits who donāt know their Vitalik from their Satoshi.
Why? Because until we make this space easy, accessible, and appealing (strong emphasis on the latter) to people and non-profits stuck in the old model, weāll never achieve the kind of revolutionary mass adoption we need to build a better tomorrow and scale the EarthFund platform.
Thatās why weāre focused on simple UX. Thatās why weāre focused on creating a no-code DAO creation dashboard. And thatās why weāre on a mission to become the Squarespace of DAOs.
(We talked about this a lot in last weekās update. If you missed it, check it out.)
3. Auto-converted on-chain donations to USDT (and donation widgets you can put anywhere)
Right now, our crypto donation feature lets you donate in any ERC-20 token and then auto-converts it to USDT before adding it to the DAOās grant wallet. Soon, weāll be adding fiat and multi-chain donations too.
That means that youāll be able to donate any crypto you have to the causes you care most about, all from one place.
Why is this such big news? Last year, crypto donations were up by 1588% from $4.2M in 2020 to $69.6M in 2021. And this year, the crisis in Ukraine has shown the world just how important crypto donations are for tackling global problems.
And all of these donations came in without there being a central platform for people to go and donate crypto to causes they care about.
With EarthFund, weāre making it even easier for you to find causes that need donations and then donate with a credit/debit card or any cryptocurrency.
Why does our donation router convert to USDT?
While weāve partnered with Coinshift to allow for intuitive treasury management with first-class UX, adding all ERC-20 tokens straight to the wallet still required users to have a base understanding of the crypto market and make collective decisions on when to liquidate.
While we know there are a lot of benefits to causes holding many different tokens, the main drawback is that makes the treasury management process complicated and bloated. Ultimately, this reduces efficiency and undermines our goal of streamlining cause management.
Instead, with every donation automatically converted to a stablecoin pegged to a tangible, familiar currency (the US dollar), you can see exactly how much you still need to raise before you can fund a project without having to decipher the fluctuations of the market. In other words, itās just simpler for everybody to understand. And ultimately, thatās our MO at EarthFund.
Whatās the donation widget?
Weāre in the process of building a donation widget that non-profits and individuals can embed on their websites to allow people to donate to their DAO without even visiting earthfund.io.
Itās in the early stages of development right now, but itās another tool that weāre building to help decentralize philanthropy and bring doing good onto the blockchain.
4. On-chain KYC for potential tax benefits
Giving people who donate in crypto tax breaks was always one of our big goals.
In the early stages of EarthFund, we considered becoming a 501c3 to facilitate this, but that was incompatible with our model and decentralization, so we put it on the back burner.
However, weāre making progress on cracking the nut.
Weāve innovated a way of getting KYC on-chain (through our partnership with Sumsub and Labrys.io) so that whenever you donate to a DAO on the platform thatās associated with a 501c3 (like The Chopra Foundationās NeverAlone DAO) then youāll be eligible for tax benefits.
There are still a lot of things for us to work through. Thereās a lot of legal legwork, a lot of logistical things to work out, and ā of course ā we need to work out how to make it all super simple and intuitive.
But weāre more and more confident now that weāll be able to create the infrastructure for users to get tax receipts for some (though perhaps not all initially) donations made on the EarthFund platform.
TLDR: weāre flipping the giving economy on its head
Weāve got a big vision not just to make EarthFund the go-to platform for world-changing communities, but the infrastructure on which the new, on-chain giving economy is built.
How do we get there? The same way we launched a platform, got featured in Forbes, CNBC and CoinTelegraph, and partnered with The Chopra Foundation in just 9 months: by building, no matter what.
Better donations, clearer messaging, and website tweaks
On the back of our newly-clarified vision, our product and development team got to work on improving the messaging on our website (to bring in new users and appeal to investors) and creating a better donation flow.
(They also continued work on the DAO dashboard, but that was mostly runaway states and UX tweaks, so nothing substantial to update this week.)
Better donation flows
Donations are the beating heart of the EarthFund platform. And with our new focus on improving the benefits for donors with tax receipts, itās even more important that we make sure donations are front and center.
Our product team is currently in the process of creating new concepts for the donation pages and designing the donation widget for external websites.
Here are a few sneak peeks š
(Note: our current strategy is to have both Concept #1 and #2 working in parallel, with Concept #2 showing up when Concept #1 isnāt visible.)
Clearer, cleaner messaging
Coming soon, youāll see new messaging on earthfund.io designed to give a much clearer idea of exactly what we do, what weāre building and why you should be excited about what weāre building.
For example, there will be this new header section on the homepage:
And this new page that highlights the technology weāve built for founders to launch DAOsā¦
Simpler language to make Web3.0 more accessible
One of the most overlooked elements of UX is language. Without fail, websites and platforms that use simpler language win bigger than those that use complicated, confusing language with complex terminology.
(And if thereās one industry particularly blighted by obtuse language, itās blockchain and crypto.)
In other words, if we want a platform that everybody ā from computer scientists to crypto newbies ā can use with ease, we need to make sure our language is super simple.
(And if anybody is worried about EarthFund seeming too Fisher-Price with simpler language, study after study after Nobel-Prize-winning study have shown that the secret to coming across as an intelligent expert in your writing ā even if youāre writing to an audience of experts ā is to keep the language and sentence structure as simple as possible.)
So, with that in mind, we found one area that our community always needed clarification on and simplified it.
Linguistic improvement: Funds are now grants
Originally, we really liked the idea of having pots of money called Funds because it tied back to EarthFund. From a brand perspective, it made sense.
However, brand and UX are not always the best of friends.
And in this case, we found that both our community and the press almost always referred to funds as āgrantsā.
And thereās no sense swimming against the tide.
So weāre beginning the transition from Funds to Grants.
Itās cleaner and far more intuitive. Plus, itās how Web2.0 non-profits speak, so that makes their transition over to Web3.0 easier too.
Thereās an old UX metaphor about desire paths ā those muddy paths you see that people have trodden away from the pavement ā that rings true here.
TLDR: we donāt want to fight the userās natural instinct. We want to flow with it.
Spreading the word about EarthFund
Continuing to work with The Chopra Foundation on co-marketing opportunities
Last week, we had a great meeting with Gabriella, Poonacha and the Never Alone team on some exciting opportunities for co-marketing in the next month. (September is Suicide Awareness Month.)
Keep your eyes peeled for some more Twitter Spaces, marketing activity and (potentially) some more big opportunities for EarthFund.
Promoting EarthFund with Labrys
One of our most successful PR strategies to date has been to team up with other players in the space for co-promotion.
This week, weāll be meeting with the PR team at Labrys (who have worked with other big blockchain names) to look for opportunities to discuss the work weāve been doing together, the innovative solutions weāve created and to promote the platform to a wider audience.
Today, our advisory council is meeting to work on the final investment strategy to bring investors into the EarthFund project.
Weāll update you next week on the decisions but we wanted to keep you in the loop. This is the last step before we get our team working overtime on outreach, booking in meetings with investors and finding investors that are aligned with our mission and vision.
Watch this space for updates š
A recent update stated that āCause founders can choose between auto-enrolling all users into the rewards pool OR giving members the choice whether to enter the rewards pool or not.ā Why are DAO founders given the choice?
This is a great question because it really gets to the heart of a few things.
We know this feature isnāt a sexy game-changer, but we believe that itās incredibly important to give DAO founders as much control as possible when theyāre setting up their DAO.
For example, perhaps a DAO is being set up by a foundation that wants its team to be involved in the decision-making, but canāt have its team receive rewards because of legal reasons or conflict of interestā¦
In this scenario, they can have their community opt into the rewards pool and keep everything above board.
If this didnāt exist, itād likely be a blocker and a barrier to non-profits with their strict guidance and regulations.
The official Earthfund website contains links to all the social platforms except Medium. Will that be added to the website as well?
Great observation. Weāre working on getting that added ASAP.
Now that the suicide prevention AI is funded, where can we find updates on its development?
Another great question. The Chopra Foundation has given updates on PIWI in all of their Twitter Spaces so far, including an interview with the dev team behind the AI and the plans for the future.
You can check it out here š
How can you help? Help us spread the word
- Leave a positive comment on KuCoinās new comment functionality
- Follow us on Twitter and give our posts a like/retweet ā 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 youāre 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 ā weāre always available to answer questions in Telegram. (And if our community team doesnāt have the answers, weāll 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!
Letās build a better tomorrow, together.
New to EarthFund? Hereās everything you need to know š
Start a world-changing DAO 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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