EarthFund platform update 11/07
The EarthFund platform gets a soft launch and our new site goes live 🔥
Get the inside scoop on a week that saw the soft launch of our new platform and the new EarthFund website go live 🚀
👋 We’re 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 #19 in our new weekly update on everything that happens behind the scenes at EarthFund’s (distributed) HQ.
🚨 There’s important information about an upcoming DAO vote at the end of this update. Make sure you check it out and stake your 1Earth to have a say!
Dive straight in 👇
EarthFund platform update 11/07
The platform has soft-launched🌍
TLDR: the EarthFund platform
Why is this such massive news?
Changing our positioning to a Web3.0 SaaS company
We need your say on a corporate restructuring to secure investment
Happy Monday, Earthlings 🌍
This week is an incredibly exciting week in the history of EarthFund: less than a year after launch, the platform is set to go fully live and let anybody launch a DAO in less than 5 minutes.
Now, we’re still in the soft launch process right now, which means we’re transferring over the beta DAOs to the new platform, making some changes we could only make on Ethereum Mainnet and doing a last test and fix of the bugs that slipped the net.
But very soon, the EarthFund platform will let anybody start a DAO with absolutely no need to understand smart contracts, Solidity code, how to mint a crypto token, etc...
This is huge.
While crypto natives and tech-heads might understand how to set up a DAO, most people don’t.
We’ve taken all of the prep, research and complications out of launching a DAO and then built the tools you need not just to launch a DAO, but to launch a DAO with everything you need to be successful and fund world-changing projects.
Here’s a quick look at everything you get when you set up a DAO through the EarthFund platform 👇
- A DAO with automatically set up Snapshot
- Your own ERC-20 token with its own smart contract
- Your own smart contract that automatically processes grants, votes and rewards
- Your own ENS domain and EarthFund domain
- A Gnosis multi-sig wallet
- A Coinshift treasury management
- A crypto donation widget that converts donations to USDT and adds it directly to your grant wallet to protect against market fluctuations
- Customizable tokenomics to reward your members
- Smooth onboarding and offboarding for DAO members and co-founders
- KYC processes to grow a community safe from scammers
- Token limits to prevent whales from influencing votes and claiming all the rewards
- An automatic rewards process that rewards users in USDT
- A listing on the EarthFund ecosystem and discovery page alongside DAOs from Deepak Chopra and Megan Pormer
- Promotion from EarthFund on Twitter (with lots of blue-tick followers, like Mark Cuban and Ashton Kutcher) and in our press coverage
- Your own private Discord channel on the EarthFund server that’s reserved for your token holders and DAO members
- Your own no-code landing page with Unsplash integration for images
- A quick and easy way to list your token on CoinMarketCap and Etherscan
- A quick and easy way to add team members as multi-sig signatories
Why is this such massive news? 👇
EarthFund lowers the barrier to entry for starting a DAO
Having an all-in-one platform to launch a DAO with everything you need saves new DAO founders a lot of mental energy.
Imagine this: a busy non-profit or activist wants to start a DAO so they head to Google and type in “How to start a DAO”.
Cutting through the dense language, they eventually work out that they have to mint a token, find a place to host their community, set up a Snapshot, set up a treasury, set up a wallet, figure out tokenomics, etc…
Even if they understand all the component parts, it feels overwhelming.
There are lots of moving parts that could go wrong.
It’s complicated.
It’s daunting.
And it’s time-consuming. (And humans are notoriously bad at delayed gratification.)
Even if somebody knows their Snapshot from their Etherscan, they’re still looking down the barrel of hours and hours of manual, confusing and sometimes hair-pulling work to launch a DAO. (Trust us, we’ve done it the hard way. That’s what led us here.)
With EarthFund, they can get everything set up, launched and on-chain in 5 minutes or less.
In other words, EarthFund solves the Paradox of Choice that users have when starting a DAO by bringing everything under one roof. (TLDR: having many options to choose from, rather than making users happy and ensuring they get what they want instead causes stress and indecision.)
On the EarthFund platform, all DAO founders need to handle are the important decisions (like token name, landing page, etc…), then they let the platform do all of the complicated back-end stuff automatically.
Why do we think this is going to win big?
Why is Apple outselling Android across the board when Android is more flexible and customizable?
Simplicity and security.
Apple makes things easy. And it makes them secure.
That’s what we’re doing.
We’re making DAOs simple. And we’re making them secure.
Just look how simple it is 👇
But don’t just take our word for it!
Go and have a look at the new website and hit “Start a DAO”.
You’ll be able to play around with the wizard and see just how simple it is to set up a DAO, set up your token and build a 🔥 home for your community.
🚨 We’re still testing and making some changes that could only be made with the platform live. Please don’t launch a DAO yet. We’ll update you as soon as the DAO launch functionality is ready.
Changing our positioning to a Web3.0 SaaS company
Our previous website did a fantastic job of selling the vision.
But as we leave the Build Phase and enter the Grow Phase, we don’t need to sell the vision.
We need to start selling the product and what makes it such an obvious choice for people who want to start a DAO.
So, from today, we’ll be positioning EarthFund as a “Web3.0 SaaS platform for raising money, building decentralized communities and rewarding people for making the world a better place”.
As with any positioning switch, there’s going to be some A/B testing and tweaks to get it dialled in, but we’re in safe hands. Our strategy team have handled positioning, messaging and copy for brands like Discord, Merck, Futureswap, Aurox, World Mobile, Vodafone, Brain.fm and more.
The changes we’ve made 👇
A new homepage: far more SaaS-focused homepage with social proof, benefits-led copy on the features of the platform and some high-level positioning copy.
A new how it works page: DAOs are new to lots of people. We’ve made it super simple to understand how to get involved (and why) on a clear, simple landing page.
A new pricing page: all of the out-of-the-box functionality is free-to-use, but some DAOs might want a little extra help. That’s where our support packages come in. (Note: we’re still fine-tuning these offerings.)
An improved DAO-in-a-box page: some copy edits and fine-tuning based on user and community feedback.
An improved Donate crypto page: added new information on our plans for donation receipts to help with tax returns.
A new page about safer Web3.0: safety is a huge barrier to mass adoption. Every time a pump-and-dump or scam hits mainstream news, new Web3.0 users (both DAO founders and DAO members) are put off getting involved. We’re trying to change that by creating safe environments for doing good.
A new rewards page: we’ve spent a lot of time building a smart contract that is really smart in the way it handles grants, rewards and payments. (It does cool stuff like making sure the collectors pay gas, that projects get auto-added to the queue, and making sure the smart contract checks the treasury balance and releases rewards and grants as the funds become available…) but users don’t care about that. Instead, we highlighted how it works for the end user and, again, make the platform as simple as possible.
A new about us/team page: investors (both retail and VC) care about the team behind the project. And we’ve got a really impressive team. So we designed a new About Page to draw attention to the strength we have behind the scenes.
A new press page: Forbes, CNBC, CoinDesk, Associated Press, Business Insider, CoinTelegraph… EarthFund has had lots of Tier 1 coverage and we want to highlight that.
We need your say on a corporate restructuring to secure investment
In the last month or so, we’ve been meeting with investors to secure between $12M and $15M in venture capital to continue the development and growth of the EarthFund platform.
Conversations are heading in a positive direction, but to secure investment, they wanted to see 3 things:
✅ A team of experienced entrepreneurs, advisors and team members that have what it takes to building a winning product. Check, check, and check.
✅ A working product with a strong addressable market and functionality. Check and check.
📈 A roadmap for growth with no barriers to execution. In progress. We have a roadmap and a clear strategy for growth, but we need to secure investment to really scale up our efforts and grow the team to 50–100+ employees with the view of growing EarthFund into a billion-dollar company.
In order to secure investment, our advisors have recommended establishing a new company — EarthFund Inc — to own and control the assets and intellectual property of EarthFund. (That means the brand, the software that powers the platform, etc…)
To do this, EarthFund DAO will exchange the EarthFund DAO-owned assets to the new company in return for a minority ownership stake in the new company.
This means that the new company would then be set up like a traditional software company (making it more viable for investors) without ceding any of the control the EarthFund DAO has over the causes listed on the platform, etc…
The other benefit? EarthFund DAO could be entitled to and receive regular distributions of the profits from EarthFund Inc (the new company) and have full control over how these are used.
And if the DAO received regular payments from EarthFund Inc, those could be used to do things like pay and reward 1Earth holders (in lieu of the yield), buy back 1Earth, hold in the treasury, donate to worthy causes on the platform or undertake activities to promote the platform…
Examples of new EarthFund DAO responsibilities might include:
- Which DAOs should be removed from the platform
- Which DAOs should be promoted
- How to spend the payout (AKA, $$$) from EarthFund Inc
- When to give EarthFund grants to DAOs on the platform
- If/when to buy back 1Earth from the open market
If/when to use distributions to reward DAO members
This is all subject to the terms of the investment, but we’ll keep you all updated and in the loop.
The vote goes live next week. Make sure you’ve staked your 1Earth to vote!
While this vote is a slight pivot in terms of the remit of the EarthFund DAO, we believe we can structure it in a way that everybody is set to win.
The EarthFund platform is in a good spot to secure the investment it needs to grow.
The EarthFund DAO would have full control over the mission and direction of the platform (what causes are listed, etc…) and regular payouts to spend on supporting DAOs, paying users, etc… (Of course, this is up to the DAO.)
And if — hypothetically — the platform received investment for $15M at a $100M valuation and the DAO owned 20% of the company then the EarthFund DAO would be sitting on an asset worth $20M and would be worth 20X the current market cap.
And if we sold — again, hypothetically — for $500mil and retained 20%, the DAO would receive $100M in addition to any distributions along the way.
Of course, these numbers are hypothetical but realistic.
We have the team, the experience and the expertise needed to get us to this place. But we need the help of the EarthFund DAO to take the first step, secure investment and grow EarthFund into a Web3.0 giant.
How can you help? Help us spread the word
- Leave a positive comment on KuCoin’s new comment functionality
- 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 where 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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