A pledge to deliver crypto for all

GoodDollar’s drive to deliver crypto for all has won an important vote of confidence from founding sponsor eToro, which this week pledged to raise its initial stake in the project more than 17-fold to $1 million.

This latest in a string of positive developments for GoodDollar will help speed the release of Version 2.0 of the protocol and enable us to mint and distribute even more of our native G$ token to a growing and engaged community that already spans the globe.

eToro, the world’s leading social trading and investing company, has backed GoodDollar since the start as part of its larger mission to educate real everyday people about capital markets, particularly digital assets.

Founder and CEO Yoni Assia first mused about the possibility of an egalitarian and community-led “philanthropy bank” in the 2008 essay “Good Dollar: The Visible Hand”. A decade later, he unveiled the non-profit GoodDollar Foundation and charged it with building a protocol that would use the dynamism of blockchain technology to provide basic income payments to all.

Using DeFi for good

In September 2020, GoodDollar was born. The protocol has since exceeded every expectation; minting and distributing more than $20,000 worth of G$ crypto tokens to a 300,000-strong community in virtually every country in the world—all based on eToro’s initial $58,000 stake.

It was that success that led eToro to deepen its commitment to the project.

“Too many underprivileged people are locked out of opportunities that could take them out of poverty, including access to capital markets and digital work opportunities,” said Assia.

“The GoodDollar project aims to alleviate that by fostering financial inclusion and empowerment around the world. Our hope is for other innovation leaders who recognize the potential of crypto to join us and help use the burgeoning power of DeFi responsibly.”

Innovation leaders will soon have that chance. This fall, we will open the GoodDollar Trust—the engine that powers the creation of G$—to anyone who wants to pledge capital to support the goal of providing a digital universal basic income (UBI) to claimants around the world.

Our new donors will join an impact revolution that is already underway and growing. By leveraging the flexibility of the $80 billion decentralized finance (DeFi) industry, the GoodDollar model has turned traditional philanthropy on its head.

Why does “staking” revolutionize how we think about impact?

First off, stakes to the GoodDollar Trust are not donations. They are capital deposits that remain intact and, because of GoodDollar’s ability to “wrap” around popular staking protocols such as Compound and Aave, earn returns for those who are helping us generate G$.

GoodDollar is also without geographical, economic or regulatory limits. Anyone, from the largest corporation to the socially conscious barista with a few euros to spare, can become a philanthropist, just as anyone with a mobile phone and an internet link can claim G$.

This simplicity and freedom from barriers makes GoodDollar the ideal onramp to the digital economy for the 1.1 billion unbanked adults who already own a mobile phone.

The additional funds from eToro will significantly enhance our ability to generate UBI for our community. In year 1, it will enable us to mint nearly $47,000 additional G$, a number that rises to $60,000 in year two.

More than this, our hope is that eToro’s increased commitment will inspire others to join the GoodDollar movement and earn double returns on the assets they stake: healthy rates of interest, coupled with the satisfaction of helping to give those long shut out of the digital wealth boom a chance to change their lives. We have been staggered by the level of innovation we have witnessed in the GoodDollar community so far. From online marketplaces to crowdfunding initiatives, they are finding new and unique ways to use G$ to satisfy their own basic needs along with those of others. In less than a year, they have already logged more than 100,000 transactions, and the pace of change is only accelerating.

The opening of the Trust will come alongside two other key changes for GoodDollar: the launch of a cleaner, simpler and more powerful version of the protocol, and the introduction of the GoodDAO, a decentralized autonomous organization owned and led by our members.

Soon it will be the GoodDollar community, not the Foundation or eToro, who will determine the future path of the world’s first decentralized impact economy. And with the opening of the Trust, we hope and believe that eToro and the Foundation will be joined by a growing body of sponsors determined to help us bring digital prosperity to the world.

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