After The Not-For-Profit Project Was Announced At Web Summit 2018 We Recently Launched Our Basic Income Wallet – So How Did We Get Here, And What Does The Future Hold?

On November 7, 2018, GoodDollar was officially launched on stage at Web Summit in Lisbon by Yoni Assia, Chief Executive and Co-Founder of eToro, the not-for-profit basic income project’s main sponsor. Two years on, having launched our basic income wallet and protocol in September, there is plenty to celebrate – socially distanced fiesta anyone?! 🍸🎂🌮

We are sad that we can’t party in person with colleagues or community members right now. But please raise a glass with us virtually, as we reflect on our achievements this year and look ahead to exciting plans for the next 12 months. Because while releasing our product two months ago is awesome, we are only just getting started …

And your feedback and support will help us deliver on the complete vision of our digital economy we introduced in our white paper. Together we can help reduce global wealth inequality.

Now

Two months ago, on September 7, our project launched a blockchain-backed basic income wallet and protocol. It feels amazing after 22 months of working hard to share a real, fully-working, living and breathing product. Being honest, the global reaction surpassed our wildest dreams.

The traction for the GoodDollar wallet has been incredible. 🚀 After a fortnight some 30,000 new users had opened wallets to receive daily basic income. More heartening for the GoodDollar team: thousands of people were having their queries – not least “how many G$ do I receive a day?” – answered by other people within the rapidly growing community, on Telegram and our other social media channels.

One month in, and the data showed a continuation of GoodDollar’s impressive early progress: people from 161 countries – 83 per cent of the world – had Claimed basic income via the digital wallet. 🗺 (For more data – including cool graphs – please explore our stats dashboard here.)

More recently we have named our first GoodPeople – a nominal and regular award for extremely active and helpful members of the GoodDollar community. The inaugural winner was American Travis Miller, who has helped to accelerate both the adoption of GoodDollars and use cases by writing how-to guides and establishing the “GoodDollar Marketplace” on Facebook. The second winner was Spaniard Hugo Perea Lisbona who used Travis’s Facebook marketplace – which now has almost 12,000 members – to plant trees and help the planet in return for G$.

How Did We Arrive Here?

Exactly 12 months ago we wrote that “while we’ve done a lot of work on our first year, more work needs to be done to realise our vision for a global alternative coin that has built-in UBI”. So how did we move from there to here?

Briefly, in chronological order, here are the key points in the last year that have helped us develop the wallet and protocol before launch – a highlights reel, if you will. 🎥

January 2020
Explored Rwanda as a potential location for a basic income pilot.

February 2020
Completed a closed beta GoodMarket experiment – and all the money left in the system, around US$100,000, was later donated to COVID-19 relief charities.

June 2020
Launched face verification in the wallet beta – a game-changer.

August 2020
Published our white paper, which explains how GoodDollar creates and pays for digital basic income, sustainably.

September 2020
Launched the basic income wallet and protocol.

Improvements Since Launch

• Better sign-up/login flow: by adding Passwordless sign-up alongside the social login (via Google/Facebook account) we allow access to people without social accounts.

• The GoodMarket: our community initiated a Facebook marketplace, where you can buy and sell items in exchange for G$ coins. See here what you can spend your G$ on …

• And adding the statistics dashboard gave G$ users a chance to learn more about our economic system, and understand it better. 📊

Looking Ahead – The Next 12 Months

After considerable demand from the community, and following enough time to test and analyse how the wallet and protocol were working post-launch, Tomer, our Product Lead, inked our Roadmap for phase two of development. The main points are below, but you can read the more detailed article here.

1 Sustainable Donation Mechanism The more money “Staked for Good” to GoodDollar, the higher the daily interest payments to the GoodReserve, the larger the value of basic income distributed to Claimers.

2 Referral Bonuses Quick wins are important. What better way to create momentum then encouraging our awesome users to receive bonus G$ for inviting people to join GoodDollar? We will be releasing a marketing referral programme soon.

3 Marketplace Experiments The most common question we receive is: “Where can I use my G$?” We are working on a number of experiments that focus on connecting people and encouraging them to use G$ as a medium of exchange.

4 Enhanced Statistics Dashboard We have received many questions from users about the reach and impact of GoodDollar, and we are re-working our dashboard accordingly. Transparency is important to us.

5 GoodDAO And Decentralization Monetary decisions are baked into the design of any financial protocol; at GoodDollar, we believe key monetary decisions should be moved to the hands of the community of users.

With the continued support from and collaboration with our growing community we can achieve our goals quicker. We thank you all for your enthusiasm and feedback, and look forward to working hard alongside you in the next year, and beyond.

The GoodDollar team can take a moment to celebrate what we have delivered after two years, but there really is so much more to come … 🙏🏽

How To Get Involved

• Sign up to begin to claim G$
• Follow GoodDollar on Twitter and Facebook
• Join our Telegram group

Sign up to receive the weekly GoodNews on basic income and open finance