EarthFund platform update 08/01
The Carbon Removal DAO goes live, more plans for growth and a big thank you to our community
Last week, we launched the Carbon Removal DAO, kept rolling on the next phase of EarthFund and much more. Here’s the inside scoop.
👋 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 #5 in our new weekly update on everything that happens behind the scenes at EarthFund’s (distributed) HQ.
The Carbon Removal DAO had its first Carbon Commons community drop!
Last week, the community drop of Carbon Commons — the governance token of the Carbon Removal DAO — sold out in record time.
Just hearing about the cause? Here’s the 411 👇
Who? The Carbon Removal cause is founded by Dr. Lucy Tweed, an earth and environmental scientist committed to finding new approaches to climate action.
What? The DAO’s mission is to support communities around the world by instigating change through nature-based carbon removal projects that put local livelihoods and environmental justice front and center.
Why? Climate change is the defining crisis of our generation. Rising temperatures, extreme events, and rising sea levels are already impacting people’s lives around the world.
According to the IPCC, we have left it too late for emissions reductions alone to prevent catastrophic global heating. To limit warming to the critical threshold of 1.5C, we also need to draw down some of the carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere.
By 2050, we need to be removing up to 10 gigatonnes of carbon from the atmosphere a year.
Some of the most effective and readily scalable approaches to sequestering carbon are nature-based solutions. However, nature-based solutions are drastically short of funding, and unjust carbon offset schemes often disregard local ecology and exclude indigenous groups and communities.
What’s coming up for the Carbon Removal DAO?
Admittedly, the community drop of the Carbon Commons token didn’t go as smoothly as we planned. (See the next section for more on this.)
However, we’re very excited by what Dr. Tweed has planned for her cause.
Here’s a message from Dr. Lucy 👇
GM lovely earthlings! Dr Lucy Tweed here 👋
Dropping a message to say how happy I am to have finally launched the Carbon Removal DAO. Thank you to all you who have supported this effort, and joined the cause in its first wave 🌊. The tokens sold out in record time.
Lots of exciting things to come.
Many of you noticed some UX issues during the token swap. Thanks everyone for pointing these out. Our brilliant dev team is working hard to get these fixed. This is only our second cause to launch, so please bear with the team through some of these teething issues. It’s all about refining the platform one step at a time 😊.
Sorry to all of those who didn’t manage to swap in time. Unlike the NeverAlone cause, we are not releasing the CarbonCommons token onto a DEX (this is to avoid any price speculation. Always utiliy first 💪)
However you will be able to join the cause through future community swaps.
In the meantime, let’s get a move on finding and funding some fantastic community-led climate action projects ✊🏽🌳🌏
Watch this space 👀
Continuing the rollout of Phase 4 💪
Last week, a few big things happened:
- Reality.Eth Integration was completed (see last week’s post for more info on why this is important) 🙌
- Donation router has been finalized and is being vigorously tested for bugs, to reduce gas and limit the amount of wallet signatures needed
- Child DAO Factory — AKA automating the way world-changing DAOs are created — has entered into the detailed planning and scoping phase
This is huge. We’re continuing to ramp up and build out a platform that we genuinely believe can change the world for the better.
But we just wanted to take a moment to talk about bumps in the road. Whenever you’re building something new and creating your own roadmap (like we are), bugs and broken things are inevitable.
As Tony Hoare, the British Turin Prize winner and celebrated computer scientist said:
There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies.
The first method is far more difficult.
In other words, making things simple is hard work. (And that seems to be doubly the case with Web3.0.)
But if we want to build a platform that lets anybody get involved with changing the world — from the people that bought their first BTC in 2010 to your grandma who still accidentally likes photos from your senior prom — we need to be making everything simple.
That’s why our team works 24/7 — quite literally, thanks to the magic of timezones in Asia, Australia and the USA — to constantly build, improve and streamline the platform so that it’s easy to use.
All this to say: a big thank you to our community.
The whole EarthFund team wants to say a massive thank you for your patience as we launch these early causes and features.
We know that it’s frustrating when they don’t work quite as you expected. But we’re refining the platform with every launch so that everything is buttoned-up and perfect when the process is fully automated. (More on that in last week’s post.)
🚨 Particular shout out to: @randy_hebert, Uncle Fungus and @DavidZambranoxx from our Telegram community for helping us spot and squash some bugs and make some UI tweaks.
Remember, you’re all still very, very early
If you’re reading this post or participating in our Telegram channel, you’re still incredibly early to this project.
We only launched 1Earth 9 months ago. The platform only went live 3 months ago. And we’ve got big plans for where we’ll be in a year.
On top of that, look at all of the recent news and chatter about bringing charity and philanthropy on-chain (like this in CoinTelegraph) or how blockchain can help repair the planet (like this great piece in Bankless).
You’re not just early to this project. You’re early to a movement that wants to use crypto and blockchain not just for gains, but for a better tomorrow.
And we’re on a mission to build technology that becomes as synonymous with philanthropy and doing good as GoFundMe did for crowdfunding or Kickstarter did for entrepreneurial ideas.
And so while being early does come with some teething problems — whether it’s bugs we need to squash or riding out the bear market — it also comes with huge upside: in a year or two, you’ll have been here in the early days. You’ll have had a real say in the shape of the platform. You might even be a 1Earth maxi.
Working on making the rewards experience pop
As we said last week, what platform is more needed in 2022 than one that rewards users and makes the world a better place?
That’s why our product team is trying to make the rewards process as clean and as simple as possible.
As we said:
…while most people will jump through UX hoops to claim their rewards, we don’t want them to.
Plus, we want you to be able to see the rewards you’ve got coming up too.
That way, at a glance you can be like “Oh, I’ve got $200 to claim and then another $170 once that project gets funded.”
It encourages engagement. It incentivizes the community to push for donations. And, of course, it gives everybody well-earned rewards for doing good.
Do good. Feel good. Earn. That’s the EarthFund model.
So our in-house product team (who have previously worked on projects for small, unknown startups like Discord, GoFundMe, Samsung, Berkshire Hathaway, Futureswap, Adobe, Merck…) have been working on a rewards module for the platform that makes it super simple to see your rewards, claim them and see what rewards are coming up.
Here’s a sneak peek at our in-progress design 👇
This week marks a slight pivot for EarthFund in terms of our long-term strategy.
Over the last two months, we’ve launched two causes on the platform that tackle large-scale, serious global problems: the mental health crisis and the climate crisis.
But we don’t want to just launch world-changing DAOs. We want to launch successful world-changing DAOs that really make a difference.
And to do that, they’re going to need more than just a platform. They’ll need tools. They’ll need ideas and guidance. They’ll need a roadmap to success.
And so, while we build the automation for the philanthropic-DAO-in-a-box platform on the back-end, we’re going to be switching a lot of our focus to working with Dr. Lucy Tweed and the Chopra Foundation on how we can support them and build the tools/collateral they need to really make a difference.
And then we’re going to turn that into a playbook for every DAO that launches on the platform.
That way, they’ll have a tried-and-tested handbook for launching a DAO that has the best shot at making the world a better place.
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 going to start answering a few of the best (or most common) questions here in this post.
Community question #1: Are you running out of money?
This came up a few times in the chat recently and we wanted to tackle it head-on.
Obviously, the bear market has had an effect on every project in our space, us included.
However, we’ve already drastically reduced our running costs to ensure that we can endure the bear market, even if it sticks around for the foreseeable future.
(And because we’re transparent, you can see how much budget we have left in the treasury here.)
On top of that, we’re gearing up for an external fundraising round to give us even more capital to fund the development of the platform.
Community question #2: Are you looking for partnerships with other crypto companies?
We’re always looking for new partners to team up with, from people who can help us improve the platform to other crypto projects that we share values with.
In fact, there’s some big news in the pipeline. Keep your eyes peeled. 👀
Community question #3: Do you have plans for when the EarthFund DAO is fully autonomous?
100%. We’re working on a plan for when the EarthFund DAO is autonomous. We’ll write an in-depth post on that issue as soon as it is finalized, but it might take a while. Here’s why:
We’re currently consulting with legal before we start fundraising in September. How the DAO runs, how it makes decisions, what the DAO has control over… that’s all stuff that’s interlinked not just to our pitch, but to our valuation.
Rest assured, we’re working on it and will get back to you with answers soon!
Help us spread the word
- 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 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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