Software Developer Is Educating Brazilians About Basic Income And Crypto – And Using GoodDollar As A Tool to Build A Better World

Did you know, most of GoodDollar's early adopters – in terms of signing up for digital basic income – are from South America? To date, there have been over 4 million G$ claimed in Argentina – the top-ranking country – and in neighbouring Brazil, where less than 200,000 G$ has been claimed, one man is doing his best to catch spread the word.

Our latest #GoodPerson is software engineer, social entrepreneur and crypto evangelist Helder S Ribeiro, who lives in Campo Grande – the capital and the largest city in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul in the centre-west region of the South American country – and is one of GoodDollar's most active community members.

The 36-year old has launched a GoodDollar Facebook Marketplace for developers in Brazil, and has recently begun a podcast to educate people in his country about basic income and crypto – basically the intersection at which GoodDollar lives.

GoodDollar has chosen to support Helder's podcast, called Garantida – we have sent him some G$, naturally. And he plans to feature our project, which aims to reduce global wealth inequality, on his show – and encourage fellow Brazilians to sign up and claim free G$.

We caught up with Helder, to thank him for his support, and asked him about his background and how he plans to further the GoodDollar project. He first heard about our foundation on Twitter, via another Brazilian: "basic income activist" Fabiana Cecin (who is likely to feature as a #GoodPerson very soon).

"The most exciting thing to me is how GoodDollar combines the ability to create a 'personal' basic income with the wider goal of creating a universal basic income," Helder says. "I can invest my money, get back interest at market rates in GoodDollar tokens, and by doing that help grow the G$ economy for basic income recipients."

He is also a big fan of GoodDollar's plan to decentralise and democratise the governance of the project. "I see universal basic income (UBI) as voting rights for the economy, and I think there's no true democracy until people have their fair share of 'ballots' [meaning dollars] and can exercise choice in the markets," he continues.

"I don't think governments can implement UBI fast enough to meet urgent challenges like COVID-19 and automation, so I think making GoodDollar grow as fast as possible is the best way to avoid suffering on a large scale. Success for me is when the purchasing power of the daily GoodDollar claim for a user exceeds the global poverty line."

Helder, who says his main work has been as a software engineer and a social entrepreneur – he has recently opened a virtual co-working space for developers – has shown incredible determination to accelerate the progress of the project.

"I created the 'GoodDollar Marketplace for Devs' in Brazil so that software developers can exchange services and digital products using G$," he says. "I've also started a podcast about UBI in Brazil where, among other topics, I talk about GoodDollar."

Tech for GoodDollar

Helder also has a plan to take GoodDollar to marginalised communities within cities, which in Brazil are called 'periferias' or 'favelas'. He explains: "There are groups on Twitter – like perifaCode, Tecnogueto, QuebraDev, and others – doing great work in helping people in marginalised communities to learn English and computer programming.

"That's one of the shortest paths to better living conditions for young people and their families in those neighbourhoods, especially if they get to work remotely for English-speaking clients and get paid in dollars or euros, thanks to the high exchange rate with the Brazilian real. Software developers are also early adopters by nature."

Helder continues: "That's why I decided to focus Garantida Podcast on the Brazilian developer community, and I'm starting to build bridges to these communities of learners so that they get to find out about GoodDollar and blockchain at the earliest possible time. Then they can be the 'tech support' family member who helps everyone else get onboarded and start using GoodDollar, and that can also be a great step in learning more about blockchain and getting access to financial services that their communities are currently excluded from."

Community: adding value

What does Helder think are the key challenges for GoodDollar to be successful, and how can the community help to solve them? "I think the biggest bottleneck at this time is making it effortless to buy and sell G$ by getting it listed on exchanges and/or by building easy end-user tools for interacting with the GoodReserve," he says.

"I also think that the community can help add value to the G$, even if symbolic, by creating vertical marketplaces like, for example, one focused on language exchange – using G$ as a type of time bank among speakers of different languages."

Asked what he would tell others who would like to be part of GoodDollar, and speeding up its adoption and development, Helder advises: "Start using G$ for commerce as soon as possible, even if in contrived or playful ways. Talk first to people who are already convinced of UBI in general: getting a UBI advocate to sign up for GoodDollar is a much smaller step than bringing someone over who's unconvinced of UBI."

In a final plea for likeminded people to collaborate, he says: "To the software developers out there, I'm starting a network of #DevsForUBI with the goal of getting more people in our industry interested in UBI as a duty of social responsibility. We are the ones automating jobs away, including our own. Automation can be a great thing if we uncouple everyone's means of survival from their ability to compete with software and artificial intelligence, and nightmarish if we don't."

Helder adds: "We, and the companies we work for, should be offsetting this by committing a growing percentage of our revenue to UBI initiatives, and GoodDollar makes this easy and transparent. Find me on Twitter at @HelderUBI and let's put our minds together to find ways to pressure our industry to take responsibility for this issue in a meaningful financial way."