EarthFund platform update 08/22
ERC-20 donations, new look dashboards, and a Twitter Space with our friends at Coinshift
Last week, we made progress on our donation router, designed some awesome new functionality and welcomed some new faces and some returning faces into the fold. Here’s the skinny 👇
👋 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 #8 in our new weekly update on everything that happens behind the scenes at EarthFund’s (distributed) HQ.
Testing our donation router 🔬
The road to launching ERC-20 donations has been a little bumpy.
There’s no denying that the process of donating, converting and rerouting all of the funds to the cause treasury has proved to be a little more complex than we planned.
But now, our team’s innovative solution is in testing and should be live soon 💪
Here’s how it works:
Essentially, because the donation works like a transfer and an exchange, we need to “wrap” the donation in an extra contract so that it goes like this:
Donate in ERC-20 token → convert to USDT → send to treasury.
Without the innovative wrapper, the standard flow for this goes:
Donation in ERC-20 token → convert to USDT → send back to user → users sends to treasury.
On top of that, the wrapper-free donation requires you to sign 3 transactions with your wallet which is just bad UX and is likely to create a barrier to use.
And as donations are the lifeblood of every cause on the platform, it’s important we get it right from the start. (Not to mention, we’re dealing with people’s money, so we can’t be too careful. Hence the rigorous testing.)
Combining the DAO Dashboard and Onboarding Wizard into one dashboardđź’Ş
Last week, our product design team had one of those “can’t see the wood for the trees” moments with the DAO Dashboard and Onboarding Wizard.
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.
Here’s a sneak peek 👇
Even better, this new dashboard gives us more real estate (AKA, space on your screen) to:
- help educate new users in the intricacies, complexities, and nuances of running a DAO
- embed a learning management system to help bring new users up to speed
- include tools, tips and helpful advice on launching a DAO, minting a token, etc…
- add customer support functionality (further down the road)
- make it easier to review everything before it gets committed to the blockchain
Joining an AMA with Coinshift
Our partnership with Coinshift has already gotten off to a flying start, with features in CoinDesk, Business Insider and Pyments.
And last week, we continued to build on that partnership with an appearance on their Twitter AMA to talk about how DAOs can help fund world-changing projects.
Missed it? You can listen here!
Here are a few of our favorite quotes:
“The vision for EarthFund is to eliminate the barriers that currently exist in blockchain around giving.” — Adam Boalt, our co-founder
“The trend is definitely moving toward users having an expectation that web3 tools will be as easy to use as web2.” — David Costello, Head of Marketing at Coinshift. (That’s what we’re working on!)
Say hello to Dr. Jamilah Merrick đź‘‹
Dr. Jamilah Merrick has joined our advisory council as an expert in the Web3.0 space (with a focus on fundraising and network-building) and the founder of Ethose Inc, a Web3.0 accelerator.
Dr. Merrick has done a lot of research into the ways that institutional racism has affected our approach to issues like mental health and climate change and is looking forward to not just helping us develop the platform, but joining our causes as a member too.
Say welcome back to the man with a voice like melted butter, Alex V 🙌
After taking some personal time away from EarthFund, today is Mr. Alex Vergara’s first day back in the community.
He’s taking on a slightly different role (less YouTube, more community) but we’re sure you’ll all join us in giving Alex a warm welcome back to the project.
If you get a second, drop him a quick hello on Telegram!
Last week, we shared our new pitch deck with the community
Late last week, Adam dropped our shiny new pitch deck into the community channel so you’re all in the loop on how we’re going to be positioning ourselves to prospective investors.
We’re all really excited about this deck. One of the investors on our team said that it’s “easily one of the best decks I’ve ever seen”.
We’re making a few tweaks and changes this week to get it buttoned up, then we’re going to start sending it out and booking meetings! 💪
Interested? You can check out the current version of the deck here:
An update on the Carbon Removal cause 🙌
We know things have been a little quiet on the Carbon Removal cause front.
Last week, we heard from Dr. Lucy Tweed that her new role researching carbon capture and removal methods at Cambridge University requires more time and mental energy than anticipated and she needs a little support to keep things running.
Alison, our superstar community and social media manager, will be stepping in to help run the cause, get the ball rolling on starting the first fund and begin voting on the first projects.
Big shout out to Alison đź’Ş
Also, just to say: this is the power of decentralized organizations. In an early-stage startup, if a founder is out of pocket, things fail. In a DAO, another person steps up and we keep moving forward. 🚀
Watch this space, we’ll have some updates in Telegram this week 👀
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.
Will the Discord bot be made autonomous too in a way that it would detect newly launched causes and automatically create channels for them in the EarthFund Discord server? — Asked by @JamesRhay
100%. This is why we built our own Discord bot and didn’t use Collab.land.
Collab.land is great, but it only searched for one token to let you into one cause. Our plan for the platform is to have it be the home to hundreds of world-changing causes with users involved in several communities each, so we needed a bot that let you into many.
And, obviously, having to manually join each community is terrible UX, so we’ve built the bot to automatically add/remove you from Discord communities as you add/remove governance tokens from your wallet.
There is a new investor round starting, what is the investment opportunity? The tokens all appear allocated already so what exactly is an investor purchasing at this point? — Asked by @CryptoGrandma
This is a great question. Currently, our approach is setting up a company that owns the software and technology that we’re building and that receives the profit from the platform. (AKA the fees from the donations and any future revenue models we introduce.)
This approach does two things:
- Positions the platform as a more attractive proposition to investors — AKA, not reliant on the price of the token
- Ensures that your 1Earth tokens aren’t negatively impacted by large investors buying/selling their tokens
Note: this approach isn’t set in stone and we’re still in conversation with lots of lawyers and experts on our approach. But we wanted to give you some insight into how this will work and reassurance that we won’t be selling token to raise capital.
Will multi-chain and fiat donations be possible when the new donation router is up? — Asked by, well, lots of people
Absolutely. Our partnership with Simplex means that we can facilitate donations to causes with a credit or debit card, which is going to be huge for mass adoption.
As we pick up more press and momentum, donors won’t have to deal with the barriers to entry (setting up a wallet, KYC on a CEX, etc…) to donate. They’ll be able to donate securely through the Simplex integration.
And multi-chain? That’s always been on the roadmap and will be one of the next things we tackle after the donation router is live. 💪
Help us spread the word
- Give Alison as much support as you can on Twitter and Telegram by liking the Carbon Removal posts and asking insightful questions
- 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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