Meet 5 Entrepreneurs Engineering Social Good On The Blockchain

Holke Brammer was wearing a stylish black hoodie with the slogan “Public Goods” across the chest when I interviewed him for this article. Brammer earned his doctorate in political economy from Stanford with the goal of understanding how to motivate people to do good in the world. “I studied how we get good long-term policies in democracies, which is obviously not trivial,” he told me.

He did not stick to studying policies in academia, but continued to experiment and implement them. “I worked on large-scale innovation processes in Germany between civil society and the German state, and organized the biggest hackathon around COVID. It was actually the biggest hackathon so far with 28,000 people. We basically took the challenges from COVID, from tracking and tracing of COVID, to how small businesses apply for government grants, to how we deal with domestic violence.”

Brammer calls this method open social innovation; it seeks to blend bottom-up, raw and decentralized ideas with top-down institutions that can scale and support the best concepts. Brammer is now further developing the theme of open social innovation as a researcher at Protocol Labs and will lead the recently launched Hypercerts Foundation as director and chairman of the board.

Hypercerts aims to stimulate social good

Hypercerts offer an incentive and recognition mechanism for those pushing for social good on the blockchain. And Brammer is not alone in being attracted to using blockchain technology with a desire to construct a better world. It’s a topic often touched upon by EthereumETHEthereum founder Vitalik Buterin, who has pioneered smart contracts, decentralized autonomous organizations, and square funding. ETH has become a go-to chain for developers looking to improve everything from drug development to climate change. In this way, DAOs like the Gitcoin DAO provide millions of dollars in assets and compensate some contributors with more than $100,000 in cryptocurrency each year.

In the company’s blog post announcing Hypercerts’ collaboration with crypto crowdfunding platform Gitcoin, it encourages crypto users to “imagine a world where positive impact was one of the most valued creations in our society.” Through this collaborative initiative, qualified grantees who are already working with public goods can now issue an evidence certification for their work.

Gitcoin

From an impact perspective, Gitcoin is one of the most impressive players in financing public goods. Founder Kevin Owocki credits the book “Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software” by Nadia Eghbal as one of the inspirations for starting Gitcoin, which was originally founded in 2017 to support open source software projects. Owocki coined the term “green pilled”; a play on the classic red vs blue pill from the 1999 film The matrix.

One year later after Gitcoin was founded, Vitalik Buterin introduced the concept of square funding, and Gitcoin launched a grant program around the idea. The basic concept of square funding is that the number of contributors to a particular project matters more than the amount donated. In philanthropy, donations are often matched by major donors or corporations on a 1:1 basis. In a square fundraising round, the amount matched increases exponentially with the number of donors. The method has been used to distribute over $22 million, most of which was done through Gitcoin Grants.

Gitcoin recently published the source code for their entire grant mechanism, allowing anyone to run grant rounds. It’s an exciting development in the space and a tribute to the open source mentality that Owocki founded the company on years ago.

Gitcoin opened its Beta funding round today, April 25, 2023. Check out their website to browse public good projects now open for donations.

DAO coordination and impact tracking

Recognizing work is not new in itself; companies do this all the time using project management tools and encouraging people to use things like company goals tied to bonuses. But work done in decentralized autonomous organizations sometimes requires an entirely new form of tracking.

Some popular tools for work tracking or impact tracking include Coordinape, a graphical method where a community of contributors defines a time period after which community members vote using tokens of those who have contributed to the project.

Govrn is another DAODAO tool for tracking contributions. Govrn was founded by Aaron Soskin, who wanted to find ways to stimulate positive social change, such as overcoming homelessness in cities like San Francisco. What he found was that decentralized work was missing from the tool, so he built Govrn.

Simona Pop, co-founder of Ethereum bounties, is quick to shout that tokenizing social good has attracted some big players outside the cryptosphere, including Unicef, which introduced a boost token back in 2019. Born in Romania, Pop was just six years old during the revolution. She now studies DAOs, governance, and ways to “build a new table” for people to come together around shared ideas and missions.

“At the core of this, it’s about redesigning the entire model. Reconstructing the entire flow of resources,” Pop shared in an interview for Forbes, “but as I always say, it’s tough to build a new boat when you’re standing firmly in the current one focused on recovery.”

Just hype?

A poignant and balancing point that Owocki made in his talk at ETH Denver this year is that crypto can regenerate the world, but that it does not necessarily do so yet. “I’d rather not be painted as a starry sky optimist,” Owocki said in an interview for Forbes, “We should think contrarian and be resistant optimists. One of the interesting possibilities is that we can now program our values ​​into our money. Gitcoin is an example of that, Hypercerts is an example of that.”

Roxana Nasoi, a web3 pioneer and technology strategist, believes that “Open ledger systems can address issues related to transparency, efficiency, inclusion, collaboration, trust and impact measurement in financing public goods.” In addition to the increased transparency that blockchain transactions bring, many of the builders in the area are quick to point out the opportunity for people all over the world to contribute; while traditional banking and financial systems can make it difficult for people from certain countries to donate to or get paid for their work on a project.

Impact tracking like Govrn and Hypercerts and grant mechanisms like Square Funding and Gitcoin pave the way for the development of public goods on the blockchain. While blockchain technology is far from perfect, it seems to have attracted a set of builders and innovators who want to improve the world through social good. Time will tell if these new roads lead to positive improvement for society as a whole.

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