#CryptoFixesThings
Announcing RootProject’s Crowdfunding Platform
The author, Dr. Nicholas Adams Judge, is a political economist. He is the cofounder of RootProject, a nonprofit. The other cofounder, Chris Place, is a Y Combinator Fellow. RootProject’s pre-ICO raised 512% of its goal. Its ICO ends November 17th, 2017. Neither of the founders are taking any of the token supply or any compensation beyond a reasonable salary. Read their plan here.
RootProject is launching our MVP about two months ahead of schedule. It’s a crowdfunding platform joined with an on-the-ground nonprofit. After the ICO, we’ll be using our token to build a decentralized ecosystem around our MVP that scales in a way previously not possible.
I’ve been in Barcelona for the World Blockchain Forum, where the Catalonian independence movement has been engaging in massive protest after its partially suppressed but successful vote. Watching elderly owners rush to shutter their shops before the crowds came, and national police (try to) intimidate young women, I began to think about the context in which we were about to announce RootProject.
RootProject is focused on the developed world’s most intractable problems. What makes it powerful is that it leverages a crypto asset to put the strength of markets and investors behind nonprofit activity. With that fundamental leveling of the institutional economics of today’s world, we become more than a feel-good nonprofit: We can address problems on a scale that is more than a rounding error relative to the macroeconomic forces that create poverty.
So, while RootProject is indeed political — acknowledging explicitly just how broken today’s political economy has become — it is post-ideological. Liberals and convervatives love both the solutions it provides and how it provides them.
So, how do we communicate our launch to the world? Reflecting on how broad today’s problems are, and how widely RootProject’s model appeals to people across ideologies: It’s Time to Start Fixing Things.
For our outreach to the crypto community — those with the knowledge base to understand a token’s role in building decentralized systems — we’re using #CryptoFixesThings in our opening campaign, and #ProofOfPhilanthropy to describe the decentralized network we’ll build. Fix Tech, Fix Finance, Fix Systems: Crypto fixes things. That’s what crypto as an industry is up to. RootProject is the first seriously-designed crypto-powered ecosystem that’s both offline and online. It’s not just about the tech, it’s about the real world.
Come join us. Be there at the beginning. Help us as we decentralize a crowdfunding platform that is joined with an on-the-ground organization. It’s time to start fixing things.
