EarthFund platform update 08/15

Platform development, building momentum and getting ready for our first investment round

Last week, we were hard at work continuing platform development, and getting ready for our first outside investment round. Here’s the inside scoop!

11 min readAug 15, 2022

👋 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 #7 in our new weekly update on everything that happens behind the scenes at EarthFund’s (distributed) HQ.

Staying laser-focused on building an automated house of world-changing DAOs 💪

It’s no secret that the crypto space moves fast. The market rises and falls; Web3.0 technology develops at a staggering speed; new projects, platforms, and tokens pop up daily…

And in fast-moving markets, it’s easy to get distracted by the new shiny object or pulled into “we need to do what they’re doing” mode.

But successful projects — not just in crypto, but in any space — aren’t the ones that hop from shiny object to shiny object, but stay laser-focused on their Big Goal.

Entrepreneur Gary Keller talks about this in his book The One Thing, where he says:

If everyone has the same number of hours in the day, why do some people seem to get so much more done than others? How do they do more, achieve more, earn more, have more? If time is the currency of achievement, then why are some able to cash in their allotment for more chips than others?
The answer is they make getting to the heart of things the heart of their approach. They go small. Going small is ignoring all the things you could do and doing what you should do. It’s recognizing that not all things matter equally and finding the things that matter most. It’s a tighter way to connect what you do with what you want. It’s realizing that extraordinary results are directly determined by how narrow you can make your focus.
Gary Keller, The One Thing

Or, put another way, it’s like what Steve Jobs said at the 1997 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference:

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things we have. Innovation is saying no to a thousand things.

(If you’re playing Tech Company Bingo, you can tick “Reference to Steve Jobs” off now.)

And for a platform focused on simplicity — that is, making blockchain and Web3.0 simple, accessible, and easy to use — this singular focus is even more important.

That’s why we’re always hard at work getting to the heart of things and focusing on the things that are really going to make a difference to our platform and to the world.

For us, that means always working towards our core vision:

🌍 Building an easy-to-use platform for founders to launch a DAO

Despite trust in charities and non-profits declining over the years, $484B was donated to charity in the USA alone last year. And crypto donations were up by 1558%.

Non-profits need to be more transparent and philanthropic organizations need to be more people-powered, not controlled by people in a boardroom. (It’s no coincidence that the non-profits that people trust the most are based on community action.)

That’s why we’re building a platform that makes it easy for individuals and organizations to embrace the power of blockchain and reinvent their organizations (or even create new ones) with community-powered decision-making right at the heart.

TLDR: We’re building the tools everybody needs to rally the movement towards democratized and decentralized philanthropy

🌍 Making it easier than ever to find and join world-changing DAOs

We want to create a platform full of global communities with the power of billionaire-backed funds that are entirely transparent, democratic and people-powered.

More importantly, we want to make it easy for you to find communities full of your people, get involved and make the world a better place.

No bridging tokens. No flipping between platforms. No janky processes.

We think technology should make it as easy to help change the world as to order your favorite take-out or update your social media profile.

(Or, like we always say: we want to make it so easy to change the world, your Facebook-loving Grandma could do it.)

🌍 Reward people for making a difference

When you join an EarthFund community, you’re taking an active role in changing the world.

You’re vetting projects. You’re suggesting funds. You’re participating in a community dedicated to a better tomorrow.

We think that you deserve to be rewarded for that.

And rewarded in a token that’s universal across all exchanges too, so you can cash out wherever you choose. (Another reason we chose USDT. You can read the other reasons here.)

That’s why we’re extremely proud that — despite the platform being in the early stages of functionality right now — we’ve already sent an average of $130 to members of the Mental Health and Wellbeing community.

More work on the brains and backend of the platform 💪

Last week, our development team was hard at work on:

Testing and deploying the Discord bot
Making some slight UX tweaks to the onboarding flow
Building out the DAO dashboard and onboarding wizard
Rigorously testing the donation proxy wrapper → this will allow for smooth donations in all ERC-20 tokens
Editing the EarthFund Governor contract → the EarthFund governor contract oversees all of the automated DAO set up and handles things like setting up ENS, Snapshot, etc. We’re making edits to make sure it works flawlessly and working with the Snapshot team to ensure that it always plays nicely with their system.

All of last week’s work is very technical and about making sure the platform works perfectly every time AND is super-easy to use.
We don’t want to turn this post into War and Peace, so we’ll spare you the details. But if you have any questions, hit us up on Telegram and we’ll get you answers!

More work on the DAO Dashboard and Onboarding Wizard 💪

Last week, our product team spent the week building out more of the v.1 onboarding wizard and DAO dashboard to make sure they’re as simple and as intuitive as possible.

DAO Wizard — making it easy to start a world-changing DAO

We spent a lot of time this week managing the delicate balance between simplicity and autonomy.

Too simple and you remove autonomy from decentralized autonomous organizations.

Too complex and you create barriers to entry and make the offering unappealing to mass adopters and organizations that want to get involved in Web3.0.

But, we’re getting close. We think we’ve whittled away some of the more complicated processes in setting up a DAO and allowed for optional steps for more advanced users.

This way, you can set up a DAO following our recommended advice if you’re a DAO newbie or roll up your sleeves and make things more complicated and custom if you’re au fait with all things DAO.

For example, the DAO wizard now lets you:

Choose your token name
Choose your token symbol
Choose your ENS domain/earthfund.io domain
Write your manifesto
See your cause page preview
Set an initial community token drop date
Decide how many tokens to drop
Set your max cap for users

And, of course, there’s a flow to swap 1Earth for your governance tokens and remove them from circulation.

DAO Dashboard — making it easy to manage your DAO

As we said last week, starting a DAO is one thing. Managing it is another.

That’s why, to make things easier, we’re building an easy-to-use DAO Dashboard that lets you manage every aspect of your DAO.

From one place, you’ll be able to:

pay your team
release more tokens
list on a DEX
update CoinMarketCap
manage your treasury
sign transactions
And much more

All of this will be possible thanks to our partnerships and integrations with Gnosis and Coinshift. 🙌

Gearing up for fundraising 🚀

The vast majority of last week was spent putting together a pitch deck to go and raise some capital to fund the future development of the platform.

It’s in the final stages of review from our team right now (who have very impressive resumes on both sides of the investment aisle, from entrepreneurs with successful exits to investors that have invested in huge companies) and when that’s done we’ll share it with the community.

Spoiler alert: it’s pretty 🔥.

Featured in CoinTelegraph (again) 👀

Last week we got another mention in CoinTelegraph 💪 This time they focused on how EarthFund can help carbon removal projects around the world.

Here’s what they said 👇

EarthFund is one platform where users can donate cryptocurrency, mainly Tether (USDT), to different environmentally friendly causes on the platform. The platform also has a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) and houses a treasury that allows DAO members to decide how the funds are used. Smaller communities within the ecosystem choose which causes get highlighted for donations. Carbon capture and storage, as well as renewable technologies and conservation, are some of the areas that are explored when it comes to improving the environment.

That’s CoinTelegraph, CoinDesk, CoinMarketCap, Tech Startups, Yahoo!, and Business Insider that have written about us in the last month 🔥

Planning a Twitter Space with Coinshift 💪

Watch this space, but we’re in early talks to hold a Twitter Space with our friends over at Coinshift to talk to their DAO-friendly community about everything we’re doing over here at EarthFund.

More details to follow!

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.

Community question #1: What is a Child DAO?

This is a piece of terminology we use internally that we need to iron out. It’s a little too technical and we’re trying to reduce how much we use it to communicate.

However, in a nutshell, a cause on the platform is a Child DAO or subDAO. That means that it originates from the EarthFund DAO (as the parent) as they have final approval on whether a cause is approved.

Essentially, when we talk about a cause on the platform, it’s a Child DAO.

But, like we said, it’s confusing terminology that we need to stop using. So if you see us slip into tech talk anywhere, call us out on it!

Community question #2: Is the team selling team tokens?

Not at all. All of the team tokens are locked up until December 2022 and then vest over 5 years.

They’re also going to be programmatically liquidated by an algorithm for two reasons:

This allows the team to liquidate their tokens without negatively affecting the market. The algorithm calculates how many to sell and when based on the market and volume. It does this by selling a small percentage of the previous week’s trading volume so that the tokens are never dumped onto the open market, as happens with other projects. The team are then distributed their pro-rata share of the proceeds every month. (We’ve written about this before if you want more information.)
It increasingly cedes control of the EarthFund DAO over to the community and prevents the team from retaining whale-like control over the DAO once it is fully developed.

Community question #3: Will the DAO dashboard be modular?

At present, we’re building a v.1 universal dashboard for all DAOs on the platform.

However, an easy-to-use, intuitive, customizable modular dashboard is very on-brand for EarthFund and is something that came up in the design process for v.1, so watch this space. 👀

Community question #4: When the platform is fully automated, will I be able to launch a DAO that’s similar to another DAO on the platform?

Ultimately, this will be a decision for the EarthFund DAO as they have final sign-off on all causes added to the platform.

However, as long as your DAO is substantially different from another DAO on the platform — say you have a DAO that focuses on mental health from a research angle — then it should be all good.

(Once the platform is developed, we’ll be looking at building tools for inter-DAO cooperation and collaboration too.)

Help us spread the word

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.
CoinTelegraph

We’re building a better world, together. Come join us.

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