At GoodDollar We're Trying To Build Decentralised UBI With Blockchain, And Here’s How ...

Just over a year ago, in November 2018, the GoodDollar team began its mission to build a decentralised cryptocurrency with in-built universal basic income (UBI) to reduce global wealth inequality. We also set out an economic framework with the clear goals of creating a simple and accessible wallet and, ultimately, democratic governance, powered by decentralised ubi.

The Alpha V3 wallet, launched in December, is a continuation of our aim to build a “human-first” wallet, simplifying complex crypto interactions, such as signing transactions, seed phrase recovery, and so on. Like V2, V3 includes mostly bug fixes and improved UX.

The most interesting evolution for Alpha V3 is the adoption of our new smart contracts system, developed with our friends at eToroX Labs. This enables a decentralised autonomous organisation (DAO), based on DAOStack framework, where the UBI monetary policy can be directly controlled by the DAO.

The DAO contracts will be deployed both on the Ethereum mainnet and on a sidechain. Once a scheme (proposal) to mint tokens is approved on the mainnet DAO, those GoodDollar tokens are then bridged over to the DAO account on our sidechain, Fuse.io, using Delegated Proof of Stake (DPoS).

Each verified GoodDollar user can then claim their daily UBI, which is distributed according to the UBI scheme approved on the sidechain DAO. Eventually, the GoodDollar citizens will be called to vote, periodically, on the minting and distribution formulas giving them full sovereignty over their money.

Additionally, GoodDollar has made a contribution to Gun, the P2P database we are using. The contribution includes support for Gun cryptography module “SEA” in React Native, meaning that now we have a P2P database with in-built cryptography in our native app.

To learn about V3 and GoodDollar’s direction of travel — and contribute to reducing global wealth inequality — please view the README and code of our GoodContracts page on GitHub.

What’s Next?

One element that we have been working on recently concerns non-custodial wallet recovery, thereby circumnavigating the dreaded seed-phrase backup process. Some interesting approaches are secret sharing, as implemented by ZenGo wallet, and the distributed key generation as promoted by Tor.us. We hope our next iteration will include parts of this work.

If you’re keen to help us progress faster on our vision for Global financial inequality reduction, using UBI, please ping us at builders@gooddollar.org.