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· 3 min de lectura
Lauren

Upholding our values of Transparency and Accountability by sharing recent development updates from this past sprint.

In this past sprint, we worked out the kinks on our rich text editor, allowing Makers to add photos, videos, numbered lists, font styles, headers and more to project descriptions and updates! This should be ready to go on giveth.io this week. If you’re a project owner, be sure to log-on and update your description to get potential Givers even more excited about what you’ve been up to.

Rich Text Editor Embedded in Create-a-Project
Rich Text Editor Embedded in Create-a-Project

We also spent some time optimizing the presentation of our Dapp for Mobile, fixing some visual inconsistencies and improving overall usability. We improved upon our email notifications, ensuring that Givers and Makers receive confirmation when a donation is made.

We developed and implemented automated testing for the create-a-project flow and updated the testing guidelines in our documentation — two measures to ensure that new features work as intended.

We also addressed a few bugs: ensured that cancelled projects don’t show up in the projects list, fixed pricing, and rerouted external links for xDai donations to blockscout.

One of our all-star developers also surprised us this past sprint with a proof of concept: building Giveth.io using Next.js and Vercel instead of Gatsby and Netlify. Once we make sure all our functionality is bug-free, this change will drastically improve the UX. We’re talking faster site build, fewer issues on loading and updating, and an overall snappier site experience.

In the future, we’re going to be enhancing the UI so Makers will be able to upload photos via Unsplash when editing or creating a project. We are in the process of updating our Join, About, Contact and Support sections to the most recent info. We are also still working on the integration of an embedded chat bridged directly to our team, and project/profile verification using 3box or other.

Finally, the most exciting update to share is that we are working on giving the site a little makeover. We won’t give too much away, but here’s a little sneak peak of the new design:

Working on a New Look for Giveth.io
Working on a New Look for Giveth.io

We want to extend a huge thank you to our community for all your support so far! Since launching in March, Giveth.io has seen the following metrics:

Working on a New Look for Giveth.io
Site Metrics from Giveth.io

As always, we are committed to building the future of giving based on feedback from you, our community! Let us know what you’d like to see us work on in future sprints by trying out the DApp and sharing your thoughts in our Discord.

Thanks for reading and we’ll see you at the end of the next sprint for more dev updates 😘

Many thanks to our amazing team for making all this possible: James, Mateo, Kay, Merlin, Danibelle, Willy, Griff, Marko, Mitch, Ashley, and Lauren!

Want to get more involved?

Help us Build the Future of Giving: 🦄 Donate directly 🦄 or buy a Ledger with our affiliate link

· 6 min de lectura
Mitch

We asked our community to add their projects to giveth.io and share their stories about how they are changing the world for the better using #giveth4change. Read on to discover our first round of submissions, or submit your story via twitter or reddit to be featured in our next summary.

Purrfect Project on Giveth

Wow 2 weeks already into the change-maker campaign! It’s been an exciting couple of months for Giveth. We’ve come hot off the heels from the Giveth.io launch right into this opportunity to hear about projects making a difference across the globe. We’ve received six outstanding submissions that we would like to highlight in our first roundup. Without further ado here they are!


Sage to Saddle

aims to focus Native American youth on healthy lifestyle alternatives, rising above the poverty and substance abuse that they often live with. Nate Bressler realized while on photo-assignment shooting Native American horse racing teams for Outside Magazine, that a winter horse riding facility would greatly benefit the community of Pine Ridge, South Dakota. He teamed up with Lakota Native, Stan Brewer, the driving force behind Pine Ridge’s horse community and Angela Smith, who grew up in Utah and has been involved in nonprofits her whole life. Together, they created lofty but attainable goals that will bring structure, education, celebration, along with the opportunity for these Native youth to lift their chins with pride.

This project hopes to provide an after-school program for kids 8–18 focused on equine relationships in an indoor horse riding arena. Students of the program will be granted the opportunity to learn and grow while carrying on a traditional relationship with the very animal that made their ancestors’ survival possible. Check out Sage to Saddle on Giveth here!

Conscious Medicine Collective

dreams to create a one-of-a-kind psychedelic consciousness center. Manex Ibar and Victoria Ibar, partners and founders, intend to create powerful experiences to bring together creativity, music, art, and high-end healing. The intention is to gather medical practitioners and influencers together into a club that fosters innovation, problem solving, and creative solutions through the use of plant medicines, psychedelics, and consciousness programs. They seek funding to establish their center on 12 acres of land they already have purchased in the picturesque Basque Pyrenées. Conscious Medicine Collective aims to bring magic, nature and wonder into an experiential club center that provides elevation of consciousness. Venture over to their Giveth project page.

Trust Graphic Novel

is a transmedia project by Blockchain Philanthropy Champion Anne Connelly and accomplished artist and storyteller Chief Nyamweya. Both a graphic novel and motion comic, it is set in a future African nation that tells the story of Moraa, a young woman who learns about blockchain and uses it to protect her homeland from cultural and ecological destruction. By using storytelling to educate readers about blockchain technology, they hope to inspire African youth to see a bright future and link them to the training to create it. Currently Anne and her team are partnered with groups in Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda and South Africa. The book will cover the basics of blockchains and cryptocurrency, and provide resources and links to their African-based educational partners. You can find their Giveth project here.

Bloom Network

represents an international community of people and projects working toward regenerative cultures. Local Bloom hubs around the world grow participation in practices such as food security, local economies, celebrations of diversity, and art as cultural transformation. There are tens of thousands of initiatives solving major social and environmental problems, who are excluded from mainstream media and institutional finance because the way they work is naturally collaborative and polycentric. Three big picture goals the Bloom Network hopes to achieve are:

  • Inspire a billion acts of regeneration.
  • Build capacity and relationships across regenerative culture initiatives.
  • Transfer power and resources to decentralized networks.

Contributions made to their project will go towards “Regenerative Actions Ticker” on their homepage, DAO templates that local Bloom chapters can use to fund the coordination labor of actions and launch the “Call to Bloom” that will help 100+ local Blooms get started as centers of regenerative action in their cities. Donate to Bloom Network on Giveth.io!

Must Have Crypto

is a Cryptocurrency project based out of Kenya led by Mutinda Kisio. The Project is about teaching the masses about Crypto while enabling them to earn a daily basic income. They have minted their own token and plan to use it to teach low income individuals and families about how to use cryptocurrency by providing a steady stream of airdrops up to a maximum of a 1000 addresses. Mutinda is seeking funding to back the value of the token and provide real value to the tokens that are being airdropped. Make a Contribution to Must Have Crypto on their Giveth project page.

Diamante Bridge Collective

is a group of land stewards in the Diamante Valley, Costa Rica working together to create collective foundational agreements and a local regenerative economy that includes digital currencies for the transparent and accountable recordkeeping of their exchanges. They are building bridges between communities and organizations, local and global cultures, property owners and skilled service providers who are committed to working together long term to care for their bio-region, their neighbors, and the community at large. The Diamante Bridge Collective functions as a hub of many physical nodes, connected via global networks of shared vision and missions with the goal of restoring, preserving and consciously stewarding surrounding lands and watersheds while living harmoniously within them in alignment with planetary values. Donations will help develop infrastructure systems to support growing communities. Head over to their project on giveth.io to make a donation!

Six change-making projects live on Giveth and inspiring change! There are a couple more weeks left to make submissions so if you or someone you know is working on a great cause then now is the time to get on board! You can check out our original medium post here for more details!

Koolaid Man

Want to get more involved?

Help us Build the Future of Giving: 🦄 Donate directly 🦄 or buy a Ledger with our affiliate link

· 3 min de lectura
Lauren

We’re back with another development update from our recent sprint cycle! Read on to stay in-the-know on what’s dAppening at giveth.io

In this past sprint, we discovered in our testing a wee little bug in our “sort” feature that was causing only the pre-loaded projects to be sorted. Rest assured, we squashed that bug and now the sort/filter/search functionality is working smoothly. We have documented how to obtain a project with a high “quality score” in our Giveth docs. Makers can now ensure that they’re doing everything they can to see their projects rise to the top!

We’ve upgraded the projects page as well with “infinite scroll”, allowing the user to scroll down the page as new projects load automatically.

Infinite Scroll is fun

To further improve upon the quality of projects on our dApp, our team has been working on the new project verification method. We are developing a process in which Makers can submit their projects for review by our team and potentially achieve “verified” status. In the future, verified projects will be eligible for some exciting benefits 😉

Bob Ross for Giveth4Change

If you haven’t heard yet, we launched the “Change Maker Campaign” with #giveth4change, encouraging Makers to creatively share their stories on how they are making a positive impact in the world we live in. Our favourite projects are going to be highlighted across the Giveth social network, helping them gain cred and support!

It runs until May 12, 2021, so it’s not too late to submit your projects!


Coming with our next sprint, we’ll be putting the finishing touches on rich text formatting for project descriptions so Makers can add photos, embed videos, create lists, format texts, and customize the presentation of their project information.

We’re also continuing to improve email notifications so that our users get appropriate and useful emails in accordance with their interactions on Giveth.

Further adding to the dApp, we’ll be integrating an embedded support chat so that users on giveth.io can ask questions directly to our team while using the platform.

Still in the works is the implementation of efficient methods of fiat on-ramping and off-ramping, and we now have more of our team members focusing efforts on resolving this long standing issue.


As always, we are committed to building the future of giving based on feedback from you, our community! Let us know what you’d like to see us work on in future sprints by trying out the DApp and sharing your thoughts in our Discord.

Thanks for reading and we’ll see you at the end of the next sprint for more dev updates 😘

Many thanks to our amazing team for making all this possible: James, Mateo, Kay, Merlin, Danibelle, Willy, Griff, Marko, Mitch, Ashley, and Lauren!

Want to get more involved?

Help us Build the Future of Giving: 🦄 Donate directly 🦄 or buy a Ledger with our affiliate link

· 3 min de lectura
Mitch

Are you passionate about changing the world for the better? We want to hear how you’re taking action to improve upon a social or environmental issue that speaks to you. Tell us how you’re making a difference. Share your story.

This is a call to action for all projects that are making a positive impact in the world! We would like to feature your stories on the Giveth social network and bring you into the Giveth ecosystem to help you achieve your goals. We believe in supporting each other to bring about global change as a collective. That’s why we are hard at work building the Future of Giving, connecting Givers to impact projects with a passion for global evolution.

Cat Donating on a Computer

In March of 2021 we launched the new Giveth Donation Application for fostering and facilitating donations to philanthropic projects on the Ethereum blockchain. It’s a free open-source platform for transparent peer-to-peer donations that aims to support innovators by building communities of donors around vital causes.

The goal of this campaign is to provide a space for altruistic developers and change-makers to talk about their passion projects, find guidance, and gain credibility and support with our dApp. So we want to hear from you! Share your perspective and tell us how you are creating change or helping to solve a problem.

Your Task?

  1. Go to Giveth.io and add your project
  2. Tell your story*
  3. Share your project and story on Twitter or Reddit using the hashtag #Giveth4Change**

*Describe the problem you’re working on, the difference you want to make, and why this matters. Your impact story can be told as a tweet thread, a short video, a blog post/article, a photo journal — feel free to get creative! Be sure to include the message you wish to share with others.

**Submissions must be made either on Twitter (tagging @giveth.io and #Giveth4Change) or under our subreddit (r/giveth with #Giveth4Change). Your submission must include your story and a link to your project on giveth.io.

Great Gatsby calling all change-makers

We will be shining the spotlight on submitted projects by sharing them in Medium blog posts, via Twitter, Discord, and blasting off your praises throughout our network. Don’t miss this opportunity to get involved and get noticed with #Giveth4Change.

Want to get more involved?

Help us Build the Future of Giving: 🦄 Donate directly 🦄 or buy a Ledger with our affiliate link

· 4 min de lectura
Lauren

Hello friends and fans of Giveth! This is one part of a series of short transparency posts where we keep you in the loop with updates on what’s in development for giveth.io.

Our new DApp went live at giveth.io on March 24, 2021, and since then we got some great feedback from our testers and community, and we’ve been hard at work fixing bugs and adding new features.

First, we addressed the issue of gas fees not being calculated correctly, added an informative banner, and enabled users to login directly on xDai chain. We disabled the ability of a project creator to use a contract address for their project so that donations to all projects can be done either on Mainnet or xDai. We also added more tokens to our list in order to allow the Giver to donate with even more flexibility!

We onboarded a new member into our dev team and thanks to him we now have functional automated testing that allows us to make changes to the DApp in development and then push to our testing site with greater confidence.

Next we tackled a bigger fish: the development and implementation of a quality score, sorting/filtering method, and search function to add greater flow and organization to the projects page.

Magic Sorting

Now the projects are sorted by default using a “quality score” — a combination of number of likes, number of donations and quality of project description. We have also added the ability for the user to filter projects by category, and to change the sorting method from the default to “number of likes” or “amount raised”.

Lastly, you are now able to use the search bar to quickly and easily find the exact project you want to view or Give to!

Filter and Sort on Giveth.io
“Filter by Category”, “Sort By” and “Search Projects” Features on Giveth.io

Another exciting update is that we’re now using Segment analytics and Autopilot to track activity on the DApp and send appropriate corresponding notifications. We also worked on some internal organization in our Discord server that enables us to receive notifications so we can monitor site actions (such as new project creation, new donation, etc.) in-house.

In the next sprint we’re excited to continue with QA by getting email notifications working smoothly and ensuring that the donation amount (at time of donation) is being calculated and added to the database correctly. We also plan to add rich text formatting to the project creation flow, and enable the Maker to add videos and/or images to their project description. Furthermore, we are now developing systems for project verification to increase the quality of projects on the DApp.

In the coming weeks we will be investigating fiat integration for on-ramping and off-ramping solutions, and continuing to work on creating a white-label option.

As always, we are committed to building the future of giving based on feedback from you, our community! Let us know what you’d like to see us work on in future sprints by trying out the DApp and sharing your thoughts in our Discord.

Darth Vaders Wants you on Giveth!

Thanks for reading and we’ll see you at the end of the next sprint for more dev updates ;)

Many thanks to our amazing team for making all this possible: James Farrell, Mateo Daza, Kay, Merlin Egalite, Danielle Gennety, Willy Ogorzaly, Griff Green, Mark Prljic, Mitch, Ashley Wagner, and Lauren Bajin!

Want to get more involved?

Help us Build the Future of Giving: 🦄 Donate directly 🦄 or buy a Ledger with our affiliate link

· 6 min de lectura
Mitch
Giveth TRACE and Giveth.io landing pages

A new DApp for Giveth has launched! WOW! Much Excite! The pre-existing Giveth henceforth will be known as Giveth TRACE. The new Giveth.io Donation Application is an important continuation of our mission to build the future of giving. Both iterations will continue to exist and do contain different features. In this article we’ll be diving into the nitty gritty to help you decide which version of Giveth will aid you the most on your philanthropic venture.

TL;DR

Three key distinguishers of the Giveths are: Trust, User Experience, and Scope. Let’s dive in.

Trust

First up let’s talk about Trust. Giveth TRACE (Originally Giveth Beta) was launched in 2017. Following the great DAO hack from the previous year, the burning question at the time was: how do we make these new decentralized innovations resilient and trustworthy? Giveth itself was on the frontlines of these events and set out to solve these issues.

Giveth TRACE employs smart contracts to handle various transparency-oriented functions of the platform. These interactions happen on the blockchain, including traceable donations, escrow, and dispersal of funds. It uses Milestones for specific projects or goals that can have conditions outlined for funds to be released. An example would be to prove work was done on a project or that money was spent to acquire something specific. The milestone contract is employed to act as an escrow. A milestone creator can designate a recipient other than themselves and also a reviewer. The reviewer of a milestone is responsible to assure that any stated expectations were completed before authorizing the smart contract to release the funds to the recipient.

The new Giveth DApp does not use smart contracts to facilitate donations but instead provides a true peer-to-peer experience where funds go directly from donor to receiver. The resulting transaction is eternally scribed onto the blockchain. There are no escrow or reviewer functions on the Giveth.io DApp so while donations are much more direct, you are encouraged to do your due diligence before donating.

User Experience

Following the rise of ‘cryptokitties’ and the mooning of the price of ETH in 2018, the Rinkeby test network was implemented on Giveth TRACE to resolve absurd gas fees and scalability issues. This allows users to interact with smart contracts on the Dapp for no actual fees, using only gas on Rinkeby to execute the majority of contract transactions. In fact, Giveth actually pays the fees to send your donations to mainnet.

“The Rise and Fall of Ethereum circa 2018 AD”

Image Source: medium.com

Profile creation on Giveth TRACE is facilitated by smart contract interactions on Rinkeby and is reasonably straightforward, however is currently limited to MetaMask. Giveth TRACE currently allows donations in ETH, DAI, PAN, WBTC and USDC.

Giveth.io has expanded giving capabilities by allowing donations in ETH and any ERC-20 Token on Mainnet and xDai network! The Giveth.io DApp uses Onboard.js to permit virtually any Ethereum wallet to be used for donations. Project creation has been streamlined, so creators can sign-in, make a project and start collecting funds literally in minutes. For creating a profile you may choose between standard MetaMask login or Torus Wallet. Torus Wallet also provides a crypto on-ramping feature so you can convert your cold-hard cash into cryptocurrency very easily and get to donating in the digital age. More Info on Torus wallet can be found here.

Scope

Scope is the last, but perhaps coolest, distinction I want to mention. Giveth TRACE has huge scope: its donation hierarchy is broken down into Communities (formerly known as DACs), Campaigns, and Milestones. Donations made to Communities and Campaigns are stored in a ‘pledge’ vault. The Community or Campaign manager can then delegate your pledge into the Campaign or Milestone, respectively, of their choosing. This system created by Giveth has coined the term ‘Liquid Pledging’ and in effect allows for curated donor funds. This means would-be donors can make non-custodial contributions to causes that they care about and funds can find their way to the right place at the right time. Once your funds have been delegated you’re able to track where they went on Giveth TRACE.

Giveth.io Dapp aims to provide a simpler experience. While not achieving the same scope of Giveth TRACE it is much easier to navigate. Donations made on Giveth.io go straight A → B and the project owners themselves dictate the scope by the projects they choose to create.

To Summarize:

Giveth TRACE

  • Allows for donations on macro and micro levels via Communities, Campaigns, and Milestones
  • Has a system of oversight to prevent misuse or fraud
  • Donations accepted in ETH, DAI, PAN, WBTC, and USDC
  • Curated Donor Funds via ‘Liquid Pledging’
  • Giveth doesn’t charge any fees, in fact we pay the fees to send funds to the recipient
  • Works with MetaMask

Giveth.io

  • Streamlined project creation accessible for all
  • Multi-wallet functionality
  • Peer-to-peer transactions
  • Giveth doesn’t charge any fees
  • Fiat donations via Torus On-ramping
  • ETH and ERC-20 token donations
  • Donate on xDai and save on gas

The new Giveth is straightforward if you’re looking to make simple donations peer to peer without any added complexity but with more connectivity. Giveth TRACE allows you to define how broad or narrow your donations are while maintaining a high standard of transparency and checks on fund flow. Each has specific advantages in terms of collecting donations. Check out both and decide which flavor suits your taste; Giveth TRACE or Giveth.io.

Want to get more involved?

Help us Build the Future of Giving: 🦄 Donate directly 🦄 or buy a Ledger with our affiliate link

· 3 min de lectura
Lauren

We are very excited to announce the launch of Giveth at giveth.io — a free, open-source donation application for community philanthropy featuring an all-new UI/UX.

Photo by Giveth

Giveth is known for being radically transparent, community-owned and community-driven. Our flagship DApp (live for 3 years at beta.giveth.io) is now being rebranded as “Giveth TRACE”. Giveth TRACE offers a platform for peer-to-peer donations on the blockchain with detailed traceability for “Givers” and mutual aid projects. However, it does require some knowledge of Ethereum and wallet management.

With the new Giveth, project owners anywhere in the world can publish an online profile and start accepting donations within minutes.

Image Credit: Grandma Finds the Internet via imgflip
Screenshot taken from Giveth

Both Torus and MetaMask wallets are fully integrated into the DApp, meaning that a blockchain newbie can create a wallet with Torus by signing in via social media as easily as the crypto-savvy can sign in with their MetaMask browser extension. Torus integration also means that Giveth is compatible with mobile and a wide range of desktop browsers.

Once logged in, a “Maker” can follow the highly intuitive step-by-step project creation flow and begin raising funds in crypto right away with zero fees added by Giveth.

100% of every donation goes directly to the project. This way, together, we can make the world a better place.

Image Credit: Imagination Spongebob via imgflip

We have really made it easy for you to give to the regenerative projects you love! Anyone can become a Giver simply by clicking donate and connecting to their preferred wallet. New to crypto? No worries! Torus integration makes it possible for you to top-up your crypto wallet easily with fiat.

For all Givers, to save and track your donations you need only to sign in with Torus or MetaMask and all that you give will be visible in your account. Your generosity shall be forever immortalized transparently on the Ethereum blockchain!

Screenshot taken from Giveth

At Giveth we are committed to building the future of giving based on feedback from you, our community.

In the next months as we continue to hone the user experience and squash any bugs we encounter while on-boarding new projects, we want to hear what we can do better to make Giveth the best user-friendly DApp for peer-to-peer donations.

So head over to giveth.io, try it out for yourself, and let us know what you think!

Want to get more involved?

Help us Build the Future of Giving: 🦄 Donate directly 🦄 or buy a Ledger with our affiliate link

· 2 min de lectura

Hello dear contributor!

It is very easy to contribute to our new Giveth documentation website. We use docusaurus v2, so you can also refer to their documentation, especially for advanced changes.

However - here are the simple ways to contribute:

Change something in a page

Editing a page;

Click on the Edit page link at the bottom of any entry.

Add an image

If your content needs an image, you should place it in this folder: static/img/content

For relative links you should also import the useBaseUrl hook from @docusaurus/useBaseUrl - place it immediately after your front matter.

import useBaseUrl from '@docusaurus/useBaseUrl'

Then you can import the image - i.e. the image I used above to demonstrate the look of the edit link:

<img
alt="Editing a page"
src={useBaseUrl('img/content/screenshot-edit-page.png')}
/>;

Make a new page

In order for this to work nicely, please fork and clone from our main repository on github and make a pull request after you have made your changes.

Docusaurus will automatically create new pages from any added markdown (.md) files with the correct frontmatter (look at current pages to get an example).

So to create a new page, you should create a new markdown document, depending on the type of content.

  • User guides should be created in the guides folder
  • Developer documentation should be created in the docs folder
  • Updates, content that does not easily fit other categories, as well as longer entries should go into the blog folder

If you want the entry to show up in the respective sidebar you will need to add the title to the existing array:

  • sidebars.js for the docs section
  • sidebarsGuides.js for the guides section No newline at end of file

· 16 min de lectura
Kris
All hands on for Giveth

A Trade leaves things as they were, with no external Surplus. A Gift creates a Surplus as it spreads. ~ Seth Godin

Giveth is exploring new territories and expanding its horizons: we are embarking on an exciting mission to enrich the Giveth Donation Application by making the core part of it, the donations, more sustainable. From enabling Givers to donate to the causes they believe in and providing a layer of transparency and accountability through our DApp, we will now be tackling the sustainability of the donation process itself. We want to create continuous streams of funding through the creation of economies around causes, by building a system of token bonding curves feeding cause-focused DAOs (with a unique governance model) on top of the Giveth DApp, in a collaboration with BlockScience.

Edit May 2019: for more on the Commons Stack initiative, read this most recent update by Jeff Emmett, for a technical deepdive by Abbey Titcomb go here.

From centralized Donations to sustainable Collaborations

If you have been following Giveth closely, you will know by now that we are not your regular organization and are constantly changing our own collaboration models through many experiments, and that we are involved in many, many initiatives, seemingly not moving in just one specific direction, but actually, we are! We are a Decentralized Altruistic Community (DAC) focused on making the World a Better Place through the use of blockchain technology, and yes, this is a wide and ambitious mission. But we have a path we are on, well, actually we have several, and we are doing this on purpose, to make us more resilient, even antifragile. The Ethereum community and the blockchain space as a whole is in constant flux, so we are working on and supporting a wide array of different initiatives (we call it the Giveth Galaxy) that we believe are bringing lasting value to the wider community.

During this cryptowinter, we ourselves, as a non-profit blockchain-based entity, have been struggling quite a bit to keep financially afloat and have only been able to do this through a generous donation by an anonymous donor, but mostly through a constant stream of personal donations by our co-founder Griff Green, for which we are eternally grateful. This scarcity however got us to discuss our own sustainability quite a bit, and the importance of good, objective governance that will benefit our individual and collective interests, our ‘Commons’. Depending on pure goodwill, even if it happens in a transparent and accountable way, is not sustainable, not for us nor for any other altruistic community: it puts you in a scarcity mindset and is a heavy distraction from the cause(s) that unite you. This concern made us see more clearly than ever that we have to invest time in bringing Giving to the next level, and change the way humans collaborate.

1–2–3 — Infinity.

First things first, we are very happy and proud to say that our flagship project, the Giveth DApp, currently in beta, is now feature-complete, bringing us very close to what we could call ‘Giveth 1.0’. This of course does not mean that we will stop working on the DApp, on the contrary, much more is coming, such as deploying our DApp on the xDAI chain, introducing governance solutions through Aragon, a complete UX overhaul and so much more. This is all in the making but in order to continue with this, we are currently focusing very hard on the funding part of the puzzle. We want to help forward the ecosystem itself through an ambitious token-engineering experiment, in collaboration with BlockScience. The target of this experiment is to transform communities around altruistic causes into entire economies and to build this on top of the Giveth DApp. In the coming months, we will be working hard on this initiative that will bring us at some point to what we like to call ‘Giveth 2.0’.

Now that we have traceable donations working in the DApp, we can start to experiment with new models to support both the organization as well as the funding of communities. Your support stays very, very welcome (all tokens accepted 🙏) but in the long run, we want to incentivize you so that you are no longer just a Giver, but have a real stake in the success of the community you will be supporting: we want to align the very human behavior of profit-seeking with socially beneficial behavior: to us this is the real Future of Giving.

We built the foundational layer of our Giveth DApp on the Ethereum blockchain and not on a centralized server to bring true accountability and transparency to decentralized governance experiments: there is an immutable piece of evidence of what happened with your funds. The true magic however, that will allow us to create sustainable streams of funding, lies hidden within the existing dynamics of blockchain technology. Every blockchain network in existence has aligned incentives around supporting the network itself: every ‘actor’ in the system, when acting in their own best interest, actually benefits the system. Miners earn inflation for supporting the network, developers hold the token hoping their efforts will raise its value, and users buy the token creating demand and pay transaction fees: it is a very simple and well-balanced ecosystem: helping yourself, helps the system to thrive, and very often it doesn’t even matter whether that system is useful or not.

We are building the Future Of Giving and are fascinated by these mechanisms, we want to use these self-sustaining models for actual good. The ‘Commons’ can be defined as “[] resources that groups of people (communities, user groups) manage for individual and collective benefit.” We, and many communities like ours, that are organized around social impact causes, are suffering from scarcity, because we think about the collective benefit and ignore the individual, who needs to survive as well; this is unsustainable. By default, people will actually do the opposite and take their individual interest over that of the common good, which is often called the tragedy of the commons. In both cases, there is a major incentive alignment issue: either the individual gains but the collective suffers or the other way around. Witnessing for a while now these emerging, more sustainable systems, we believe it is time for the next step. By modeling the success of existing blockchain ecosystems (through the implementation of new cryptoeconomic primitives) we want to create abundance to support the Commons, thinking about both the collective as well as the individual interests.

Now, our goal at Giveth is to use token engineering, more specifically, Curation Markets, to bring this from a purely digital realm, into the real world. We will build it on top of our Dapp, and build it in such a way that it supports projects that benefit our common interest, or in other words, that will enable us to sustainably crowdfund the Commons. The initial work was to enable transparent and accountable donations on the blockchain, the next step is to move away from ‘donating’ altogether and to create a sustainable system: gifted funds become backed by a token of value in a circular economy. As Abbey Titcomb says:

“We believe the answer to the underfunding of social goods and underserved community contribution is to reframe social goods as self-governing and continuously funded commons.”

Wait but How?

Through building the augmented bonding curve model created by BlockScience on top of our DApp we want to create continuously funded organizations. How does this work? We first learned about them through a post by Jeff Emmett, a Giveth collaborator, who explains the basic building blocks — a highly recommended read to learn more on how token bonding curves could enable a project to bootstrap funding and token value along with project success and popularity. You can find more references in Abbey Titcomb’s report on what we built at ETHDenver, and for all technical definitions and more theory, we refer you to Michael Zargham.

However, we would like to illustrate the theory now through a real life example of how this could work, imagining a future in which Giveth has already built this model into its DApp (also available in video format, narrated by Griff Green):

So imagine you live by the beach, and you have the habit of picking up trash regularly, but you see this is just not having the impact you desire: it doesn’t scale. For more impact you are also regularly donating to a nonprofit promising exactly this, large-scale impact but … all you see is a lot of marketing and a continuous request for more funds. This is all very frustrating.

At this point in time, you run into Jonathan, an activist who you often saw on the beach doing exactly what you do: cleaning up. He tells you about a new kid on the block: the ‘TrashHeroes’ and they are offering you something else. They invite you to not just give money but to actually help them steer the organization. In return for an amount you choose you will receive tokens, tokens that allow you to make decisions for the common good of the organization. On top of this, if you do a good job and the organization runs smoothly one day those tokens could be worth more than what you donated. This sounds too good to be true, but hey, you were donating funds anyways and with this one you get a say in the decisions!

So you give 10 xDAI (a representation of DAI token) and receive TrashHero Tokens, which you hear actually have value, in the real world. The value however, is not determined by an open market, but by a smart contract, which is actually the token bonding curve. So how does this work you ask? The price, the value of the TrashHero Token, is determined by the total supply of the token in general: if more people mint the token in return for xDAI, the price of the TrashHero Token goes up. If the supply goes down — when people burn their tokens and take money out of the contract the price of the token goes down. The big difference however with existing curve models, and which makes this one sustainable is two-fold. First, there is the curve itself which disincentivizes people who get in late to burn their tokens quickly, they need to keep these for a while if they want to make a profit. The second element is that people who get in early should be the people who are in it for the long haul, because they are the believers in the cause, they will most often be the experts. This is stimulated by preventing our pioneers from burning their tokens immediately: their tokens are locked until specific goals (which we call Milestones in our DApp) have been reached. In this way the collective interests you are fighting for are protected by default, the Commons needs those funds and outweigh your short-term self-interest, and you are incentivized to reach the set goals, the Milestones. This innovative system where everyone acts in their own self-interest, propels the Commons forward and pushes it to reach its set goals.

Back to our TrashHeroes that have invited you to be part of this initial group of experts who together have raised quite some xDAI to initialize the curve and the TrashHero Commons. One half, 50% of this xDAI, is locked in the smart contract, 50% of this xDAI is given to a DAO controlled by the TrashHero token holders to execute on their common interest, now baptized the TrashHero Commons. This Commons that supports the cause of cleaning up the beaches will now need to come up with good proposals to actually support this cause. As the Commons spends money, the tokens that were given to the group that initialized the curve will become unlocked periodically. This spending goes through Milestones you help create in the Giveth DApp: xDAI will be released once the initiative takers (the ‘Milestone Managers’) prove they have actually reached the goals they set that support the Commons’ cause (i.e. cleaning up beaches) — this is where the power of Giveth kicks in: you only get rewarded when you are being accountable.

The effective working of the TrashHero Commons is steered through a novel type of curation market governance system that allows you to use your TrashHero Tokens to signal priorities of tasks (Milestones) to be executed for the Commons to reach its goals. When a target that supports the goals of the Commons is proposed — for example, you get 15 friends together and make a Milestone for doing a side-by-side, step-by-step cleaning of 5 km of coast — and if it is supported by the TrashHero Token holders, it will receive funding from the Commons: xDAI will be sent to the Giveth Milestone. Then once the task has been completed, by documenting in pictures and videos the gathering of 3 tons of plastic and waste, the xDAI will be sent to the token bonding curve and you will be minted TrashHero Tokens, which you can then decide to burn immediately (without a need to speculate if you don’t want to) to receive your xDAI. When you or anyone else decides to burn your tokens, there is a fee that goes back into the Commons, which is the lever that will support more social good. To us, this is the Future of Giving: your socially beneficial behavior creates a surplus!

Griff Green’s talk at EthCC Paris on the evolutionary movement of human collaboration through blockchain (TrashHero Commons example starts at 10:55)

Generosity generates Income

Doing good feels good, and we hope our alternative economic system will attract more people who want to do good by not just giving but by staying involved. Instead of just simply donating, they get the opportunity to participate in a circular economy that supports the underlying cause. As more people will be encouraged to join the Commons, it incentivizes the people who initialized the curve to do even better, as the initial token holder’s funds will only be unlocked as the community actually does good, and spends the money. By being generous and by participating in good governance they can generate an actual financial return, an income — they create abundance.

Next to this, speculators will get involved, because that is what happens with tokens, and actually, its great! Secondary markets and the trading volume will hopefully create an extra flow of funds that isn’t normally part of a charitable community. After the initialization of the curve, the new donations create tokens that have no locking period, and 100% of those funds go straight into the bonding curve. When later participants burn their tokens they however always pay a fee, and this fee goes back into the Commons, which further support its goals. Every participant — whether it is an initial crowdfunder, a regular Giver or a speculator — should and will act in their own self-interest, which is steering the Commons to become a success, with everyone’s incentives aligned.

One more important note: this is a giant experiment and it may not work. However because of the use of the Giveth DApp the projects that are looking to clean up beaches, help the homeless or do research to cure Alzheimer are insulated from the governance experiment’s failure. The benefit is that these initiatives will exist on our Giveth DApp, so there are multiple ways to fund them. If a token holder really wants a specific Giveth Milestone to be supported but the governance of the Commons breaks down for one reason or another, they can burn their token (again helping the economy through a small fee), receive xDAI, and send it directly to the specific Milestone on the DApp they wanted to support. The Commons is one actor in an open system. What we will have done is create an extra way to fund projects on our DApp and most probably generate quite some buzz around that specific economy, a buzz supported both by the community as well as by speculators. Whatever happens, more people will know that this cause needs to be supported.

We started Building this Future of Giving Yesterday

With every statement we make, new questions come up (for example this dialogue in our chat), and we do not have all the answers just yet. The models we use are however based on years of research by BlockScience, and are being refined and further documented by the team led by Michael Zargham with whom we are in a constant dialogue. To put this theory to the test, we wanted to build this yesterday, so that’s what we are doing. With the very limited funds we have available, we have decided to kickstart this project by addressing the wisdom and skills of the very core for whom we are building this: the Crowd, the Commons, You. We will build and hack this together with you, and we have already started doing this successfully. At ETHDenver we supported the Pactful Team, where we won the Impact Track by building a proof-of-concept user interface for our idea. We continued at EthParis and are now ramping up to build various components that will all tie into a working whole during Odyssey in the Netherlands, the biggest AI & Blockchain Hackathon in the world. We are the largest group participating and have been accepted with five teams, working on four of the hackathon’s tracks gathering a multi-talented team of 30+ people. We are uniting developers from many different projects in the Ethereum space to form a Commons and help us build this Future of Giving, together.

Abbey Titcomb with the Pactful Team, who won the Impact Track at ETHDenver

More is coming very soon but in the meantime you can catch up by watching Griff Green’s EthCC talk, read Abbey Titcomb’s ETHDenver update, scrutinize the models at BlockScience, and keep yourself up-to-date by following us on Twitter. Next to this we are actively looking for more developers to help us build at future hackathons (such as ETHCapeTown) and beyond, so please come join our community via the Social Coding chat and signal your interest.

We hope you will join us on an adventure that has already started and is expanding our Giveth Galaxy, and invite you to be an active participant in this primordial Ethereum and Giveth-powered Commons that is Building The Future Of Giving. Join us Today.

Warm regards,

Giveth

Help us Build the Future of Giving: 🦄 Donate directly 🦄 or buy a Ledger with our affiliate link

· 11 min de lectura
Lanski

Why are bosses necessary? They aren’t. Self-managed organizations exist all over the world, but there is no template for how a decentralized self-managed organization should work. Let us try to change that.

Self-managed organizations (those without a management middlemen layer and hierarchy) have to overcome a lot of hurdles when it comes to governance. For example, on one side, the direction of the organization cannot be dictated top-down by management and on the other side nobody can push responsibility up and “just do what they are told”.

These hurdles, Frederic Laloux, author of “Reinventing Organizations” suggests, exist mainly because traditional management practices and traditionally managed organizations are so prevalent that we have a lack of examples to follow. In other words, we might have never seen better! Moreover, there have been years and years of organizational research and practice on hierarchical structures (think both about an old-age tribe with a clear, visible head and also a large corporation with a twitter rant-prone CEO).

On top of that, we have new models of governance arising within blockchain structures or enabled by blockchain solutions (here’s a pretty good article that touches on some of the key points), although there is not so much literature on specifically non-hierarchical, egalitarian structures.

While there are great companies pushing the envelope in both blockchain governance and self-management, it’s time for us to investigate, explore and document different forms of non-hierarchical governance for organizations. Giveth’s Governance Circle, and particularly Loie, whose goal is to foster governance experiments, is launching the Unicorn DAC on that regard. Lorelei devoted countless hours to ideate, iterate and bring to life this project with the rest of the Unicorns… and this is the result.

Stepping up the game

Operationally, Giveth works much like a swarm. Around a strong core of main contributors, collaborators that are aligned with the purpose of Giveth come and go and offer their time, ideas and work. Some of these collaborators do one assignment and leave and others stay collaborating on the periphery but for the longest time. They are rewarded through a mechanism called RewardDAO, with which everyone can get points that then can be exchanged for ether if they upload a video on our Wall of Fame or to the DApp itself.

But these points are awarded somewhat arbitrarily and there’s a limited amount of monthly ether that goes to fund these rewards. Hence, the amount that collaborators receive in ether can vary depending on other people’s contributions and points. We think it’s a great introductory system for getting into the Giveth Galaxy, but might not be ideal as a fully decentralized non-hierarchical governance model. In fact, it’s not really a complete governance model, as it doesn’t necessarily steer Giveth’s big decisions, but our experience tells us that it does motivate people to take initiative, talk to the most committed contributors and suggest new projects and initiatives.

Put your money where your purpose is

To be clear, governance in self-managed organizations boils down to who decides — and how it is decided — what the organization dedicates its resources to?

So in the case of Giveth, the question was: How could we empower everyone that is fully committed to Giveth to decide what actions and what strategic direction should the organization take? And even further, could we do that in a way that we leverage our own products, i.e. the Giveth DApp? -we do like our #dogfooding!

Well, the Giveth DApp allows Makers to create DACs, Campaigns and Milestones, and Givers to fund whatever change they want to see realized in the world. Could we not create a DAC that Unicorns can use to propose projects through Milestones, and other Unicorns can fund them if they think they are aligned with Giveth’s purpose? We would distribute money to our Unicorns — this group of core contributors — and they could fund any Milestone they wanted.

What better way to steer an organization than by democratizing both the access to resources and the power to propose actions and then let everyone actually put resources where the Giveth purpose lies the strongest?

Sometimes Unicorns will decide to fund already existing Milestones, and sometimes they will create a new bounty. This gives everyone the power to suggest a project, give it a price tag, and if the funding target gets reached, empower and pay this person to make it happen. If it doesn’t get funded, it would mean that the project was possibly not so aligned with the general feeling and purpose anyway.

Examples of funded proposals:

a) Lorelei is often frustrated by the lack of sharing info in the Ethereum community. Everybody seems to be having the same conversations but no one is hearing each other. When she hears about Tennagraph, the community signaling aggregator to answer just this need, she becomes very passionate about it and decides to use her Unicorn DAC delegation allowance to fund Deam to go to Web3 Summit and raise awareness and adoption for Tennagraph!

b) Lanski has identified a feature for our DApp that a bunch of Makers would like to have in the platform. It might not seem it’s a priority from a technical point of view, but as a matter of fact, all the feedback that he is receiving from the users mentions that particular need. He assesses the cost with the DApp team and creates a Milestone where they (the DApp team) are the beneficiary. The work, though, is too expensive and he cannot pay it on his own, but Lorelei realizes how important the feature is and funds the Milestone too so the DApp team can go ahead and build it to claim the Milestone.

Example of an unsuccessful proposal:

Lanski wants to make stickers of Giveth’s logo to stick all over the world — for marketing purposes. Everyone has got some stickers left from the last batch, but not enough to cover half of the world with them, so he wants to make MORE. But the general consensus is that we are publicizing well and doing the right outreach in the circles that we want to attract at this stage, so nobody actually funds the Milestone. Sorry Lanski, maybe later when we decide to do a publicity campaign for the general public!

Ins and outs of the Unicorn DAC

This Governance experiment is precisely that, an experiment. And the initial parameters are sort of arbitrarily defined and will be polished as we go along.

  1. We’ve been a community gathered around shared principles and purpose for a while now, but never had an official onboarding process because there’s no clear entity to be onboarded to. Now, we have the opportunity to come together around these agreements and create a membrane that gathers and recognizes the most committed of us as we join the Unicorn DAC. You can read about our Onboarding Process here, which ensures commitment to Giveth’s purpose and alignment with our principles in order to opt to be part of the DAC.
  2. The resource allowance per head will be the equivalent in ether to 600 USD every week. In order for people not to fund only their own Milestones, we have capped the amount people can put into their own Milestones at 150 USD, so 450 will be used to decide on other people’s initiatives. Unicorns don’t have to use the full 600 USD every week if they feel that there are no interesting projects to fund, or the ones that are truly interesting are already fully funded.
  3. Needless to say, people can choose NOT to fund any of their own Milestones. The reason why we allow people to self-fund their Milestones for a certain amount is to facilitate the funding of menial or uninteresting jobs that have to be done, but they would waste people’s time and resources if they had to be reviewed and funded by other unicorns.
  4. We cannot expect people to feel connected to a purpose by only chipping money into Milestones. Hence, in order to keep purpose alive, we have a once a month Unicorn Meeting! Here, we discuss which projects we delegated to and why it is aligned to Giveth.
  5. As a rule of thumb, Milestones will be created by those who hold roles related to the matter at hand. That’s not to say that people can’t have great ideas outside of their roles, but they should follow the advice process and certainly consult with those who hold relevant roles before taking action, even if it is merely for keeping information flows going. Roles are evaluated on how well they have been fulfilled in a peer review system every month.

MVPing our way through it

We are ready to try the Unicorn DAC and carve our own way in decentralized governance practices. As the experiment that it is, we do expect some issues to come up, and we have already identified a few:

  1. Dogfooding is our motto because we believe the Giveth DApp is a great tool. Nevertheless, it does not yet have the advanced functionalities of a compounded delegation system that would allow you to allocate only up to a percentage of funds into your own Milestones and the rest to others. We will track donations manually at this point while we look for a solution, be it homemade or leveraging Aragon.
  2. Foreign influence. Our DAC will always be public, transparent and held to the highest standards, but the fact that it’s an open way to fund the projects that Giveth undertakes, it could be exposed to an admittedly unlikely vector of attack where a powerful party decides to fund specific Milestones or projects that are on the periphery of the purpose and this acts in detriment of the best direction to take. This would be a similar attack to sovereignty to the IMF dictating policies to countries in exchange for bailouts or access to concessional loans.
  3. That said, we have funds to support this initiative for a limited period of time, and since Giveth is a non-profit blockchain entity that accepts donations, if you are a donor and want to support Blockchain4Good projects PLUS a decentralized non-hierarchical governance experiment like the Unicorn DAC, we are all ears (and eyes!): hit us up on Riot or Twitter or fund us directly!

Already winning

The Unicorn DAC was presented during DevCon4 at the Aragon Dream DAO contest… and it won the runner-up prize! 250 ANT + 250 DAI for making it a reality! Aragon and Giveth (and the Unicorn DAC in particular) share the basic principles of decentralization and non-hierarchicality. We see Aragon as the perfect tool to facilitate and enable this governance experiment.

Have a look at Lorelei pitching at minute 58:15 below!

#winning

But… why?

It is worth reproducing a conversation I had with Lorelei on the reason to spend money and effort trying to devise and implement untested ways of governance:

“Is it appropriate to answer this question with a meme?

Santa Gives Unicorns

Ha, but in all seriousness, the Unicorn DAC takes these decentralization experiments within. Any good mission reaches as far out into the world as it does into its creator, which in this case is us, the Ethereum community. We can yab about decentralization of power all day while at home we still have one or a privileged few making the influential calls on how money is spent, and this DAC offers a solution to that.”

We are launching this experiment to change how the world looks at self-management. We believe there are more human ways to interact and organize than the rigid, sometimes alienating structures of today.

Come join our dialog in our Riot or share your ideas below — they will be read and discussed! Participate and join us in the revolution of management!

Enter the Unicorn DAC.

The Giveth DAC — the community working on the DApp and many other projects — is funded through our Donation Application. We ourselves depend on you, on Givers: the people out there who believe a tool like this should be a reality, individuals who want to help us to make the World a Better Place. If you want to be one of our favorite Unicorns, go to donate.giveth.io and claim your space on our leaderboard, donate directly in the DApp (right here) or come talk to Griff or Kris on Riot, and tell us how you’d like to contribute.