EARTHFUND PLATFORM UPDATE 08/29

ERC-20 donations are now live! 🚀(And an in-depth look at our new DAO dashboard)

We’ve cracked the ERC-20 donation nut, made some exciting progress on our DAO dashboard and taken another step closer to getting decentralized philanthropy ready for mass adoption.

🌍 EarthFund

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👋 We’re EarthFund, the decentralized platform using blockchain, DAOs, and crypto to give you more of a voice in the shape of tomorrow.

This is post #9 in our new weekly update on everything that happens behind the scenes at EarthFund’s (distributed) HQ.

ERC-20 donations are live! 🔥

It’s official! You can now donate any ERC-20 token to any cause on the EarthFund platform and it’ll get automatically converted to USDT and added to the cause treasury.

(Well, technically, it gets added to the thin wallet of the donation contract and is held until the grant amount is complete. Then it gets broken up into the grant, the EarthFund fee and the community rewards.)

But technicalities aside, it means that donating to world-changing DAOs is as simple as:

âś… Having ERC-20 tokens in your wallet

âś… Choosing how much (and which token) you want to donate

âś… Signing two transactions in your wallet

That’s it!

Before our team came up with the innovative wrapper, donating USDT to a DAO involved either:

  1. Donating USDT directly to a wallet from your wallet — a barrier to entry for new users or crypto newbies.
  2. Donating in an ERC-20 token, having the donation router convert to USDTm receiving USDT back in your wallet, donating that USDT.

Donations are the lifeblood of every cause on the platform, so we’re super excited that we’ve cracked this nut and created an intuitive, simple donation flow.

In fact, it’s almost as easy to donate ETH, DAI, UNI or your favorite sh*tcoin as it is to go onto GoFundMe and donate fiat. That’s a huge win for mass adoption. 🙌

And speaking of fiat…

Fiat donations coming soon

Now we’ve launched ERC-20 donations, the next step in taking decentralized philanthropy mainstream is making sure that anybody — not just the people with a crypto wallet (which, let’s be honest, is still a relatively small group) — can donate to causes they believe in.

And that means making sure people can donate to causes just as easily as ordering from an online store or using Stripe.

That’s why we’ve partnered with Simplex to allow for fiat donations directly from earthfund.io.

Soon, you’ll be able to send the DAO you’re in to a friend or share the link on social and anybody can donate to causes they believe in.

And once we’ve done that? The potential for the platform is huge.

Check out these slides from our pitch deck for an idea of just how big things could be… 👇

GoFundMe has raised $15B. Crypto donations up 1558% YOY. $484B given to charity in USA alone last year. Talk about product market fit. 🚀
This is just the USA donations. The beauty of crypto is that it’s borderless. We want to be the #1 philanthropic platform in the world.

This comes back to what we’ve always said: we’re not a crypto project that does good. We’re a philanthropic platform that uses crypto to make things more democratic, fair and, well, just plain better.

In last week’s update, we said this:

For the last few weeks, we’d been designing them as separate flows and journeys. Initially, that made sense. You start a DAO, then you run your DAO. We were making it simpler by keeping them separate.

And then we realized, these aren’t separate flows. They’re two sides of the same flow. So they should live in the same place.

So that’s what we’re working on this week.

And boy, did that realization open up a can of creativity and innovation.

Our in-house product team has spent the last week in a flurry of inspiration creating more of the dashboard.

Fancy an inside scoop?

Of course you do.

(Note: these stats haven’t been signed off yet. The design is still in the exploration phase.)

New feature #1: A personalized DAO dashboard

Let’s say you’ve applied to launch a couple of DAOs on the platform. You need a place to check in on the status of your application and launch into the settings of each individual DAO.

This might seem simple, but it’s a crucial step in making the platform super easy to use.

But this isn’t just a jumping-off point. You’ll also be able to see why your causes might have been rejected and check in on the EarthFund DAO vote to approve/reject your cause from the platform.

It’s transparent. It’s simple. And it looks 🔥.

New feature #2: A super simple token creator

OK, you’ve been approved to launch a DAO on the platform. Now it’s time to mint your own token.

This is the exciting bit.

And now, thanks to our super-simple DAO dashboard, it’s the easy bit too.

Just choose a name, upload an icon, choose how many you want to release to your community at launch, and choose a launch date.

Clean, simple, and easy. 🚀

(We’re currently exploring the idea of a library of professionally designed token icons that you can use to launch your cause. Watch this space.)

New feature #3: Customize and edit your cause

OK, so you’ve chosen your token name. You’ve chosen your launch date. And you’ve designed (or chosen) a 🔥 logo.

Now it’s time to do some important things like:

✅ Choose your domain → this will be your .eth and .earthfund.io domain, so think carefully

✅ Add your social accounts → you’ll be able to link off to your own Twitter, Telegram, Discord, Instagram, or Facebook channels from your landing page.

✅ Edit your landing page → a super-simple, Medium-style in-line editor to add photos, edit the text and add your teammates.

Simple. Easy. Game-changing. It’s Web2.0 functionality meets Web3.0 decentralization.

New feature #4: Confirmation page

Committing things to the blockchain is permanent. That’s the nature of an immutable ledger, after all.

So we thought we’d bake in a fail-safe before causes are launched.

An opportunity for you to review everything and make sure you’re happy with it before you make it official and live.

New feature #5: Token swap

A huge part of our tokenomics is that to launch a cause, you need to swap 1Earth for your governance tokens.

This “payment” step is super important not just for transparency, but for removing 1Earth from circulation.

So, we thought we’d take a leaf out of Stripe’s book and add a pop-up modal that confirms the swap before the DAO is launched.

Pay your gas, swap your 1Earth and you’re ready to change the world.

And once that’s done, you end up here 👇

(Note how your DAO goes from night to DAO when it’s live. Nice touch, that.)

We’ll be working on fleshing out the post-launch flows and screens this week, so watch this space.

Planning a Twitter Space with the Chopra Foundation this week

Confirmation to follow, but we’re planning a Twitter Space with Never Alone, the Patriotic Service Dog Foundation, and EarthFund to talk about DAOs, dogs, and decentralized philanthropy.

(It’ll coincide with the Mental Health and Wellbeing cause’s second fundraising push to raise $30,000 to fight PTSD in veterans.)

Looking back at old spaces

The crypto space moves so fast that sometimes we forget to celebrate wins that happened more than 72 hours ago.

And looking back, we realized that we could have done more to shout about just how good the Twitter Space with Deepak Chopra, Never Alone and EarthFund was.

So we thought we’d produce a video to shine some light on it again.

(It’s also a pretty great intro to EarthFund for any new eyes, too.)

We’ve noticed more project-related questions popping up in the Telegram channel, which is great. We love that you’re all getting into the weeds of the project.

However, due to the perfect storm of a busy team and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nature of Telegram, we know that some things get overlooked.

So each week, we’re answering a few of the best (or most common) questions here in this post.

When the donations are made directly in fiat, will the donated amount be applicable for tax exemptions as per each country’s law?

This is something we’re working on figuring out. Our in-house legal team are looking into this, but as you can imagine international tax law plus cryptocurrency plus DAOs makes the whole thing very complicated.

It is something we’d like to deliver on though, so watch this space.

How will the support feature in the dashboard work?

Great question. We’re still in the early phases of working this out, but our first instinct is to use some of our fundraising to hire a full-time DAO/Web3.0 expert to help onboard causes to the platform and give them advice on how to get set up and make their cause a success.

Our thinking is that most of the users who need support will be enterprise/non-profit users switching from Web2.0 to Web3.0 so they’ll have more of a budget to pay support fees, etc…

How are we feeling about The Merge?

Hyped. We won’t speculate on what it’ll do to token prices or the wider market, but as a token built on Ethereum dedicated to building a better tomorrow, we’re excited that ETH could cut its carbon emissions by almost 99.5%.

Once it’s live, it’ll be one less stick for the media to beat crypto with and they might just have to realize that what we’re building is game-changing and has the potential to build a better tomorrow.

Help us spread the word

  • Jump into the Twitter Space on Thursday and share your support for it on Twitter
  • 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 that 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 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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🌍 EarthFund

Decentralizing crowdfunding to give you a real voice in your future. Join us 👉 https://discord.gg/earthfund