Some RootProject Announcements

The author, Dr. Nicholas Adams Judge, is a political economist and cofounder of RootProject. The other cofounder is Chris Place, a Y Combinator Fellow. Their nonprofit’s pre-ICO passed 512% of its goal.

The past six weeks have been busy for RootProject. We,

• Finished and rolled out our MVP months ahead of schedule
• Helped some great nonprofits raise thousands of dollars
• Hired a team in Seoul, as one of our first pilot cities
• Built partnerships with some great nonprofits worldwide (we’ll announce some awesome new ones in the coming weeks)

We’ve got four big anouncements. The first is that RootProject is joining the San Francisco-based blockchain incubator the Bureau. We’ll be in the Bay a bunch but also helping launch a NY wing of the Bureau.

The guys at the Bureau have helped scale literally hundreds of businesses, a number of them unicorns and even decacorns now (companies worth more than $10 billion). They shifted their focus to blockchain years ago, some having invested in BTC when it was at $2.50, and are incubating a number of social & green impact blockchain projects. It was a natural fit, in terms of experience, vision, and personality.

We’re excited to be announcing a bunch of top-notch advisors and progress that comes from our work with the Bureau.

The second announcement is pretty epic, but I have to stay vague on the details right now. Along with the Bureau guys and several other industry experts, we’re going to be launching the world’s first impact investment crypto share class. It will be housed in a well-established hedge fund. RootProjet will be one of the first recipients of investment from it, and it will be governed by a committee of impact investors and crypto experts. When it reaches a defined amount of assets under management, we’ll spin the share class off as its own fund.

Impact investing is the process of investing in organizations that focus on social, green or governance bottom lines. In fact, I’m right now at an impact investor conference in Korea — though flying today to a crypto conference in Singapore.

RootProject is one of the first ESG (environment, social and governance) crypto projects with serious economic modeling behind it. By housing a lot of the time series econometric algorithms I’m building for our own token’s open market operations within a fund, we can generalize and create best practices for ESG firms that are powered by their own token.

It’s also our hope that by creating a sizable fund focused on crypto-powered ESG projects, we can accelerate entrepeneurial behavior change in the crypto space, encouraging more people to launch ICOs forRootProject-like projects.

The conjunction of a fund and an incubator is a powerful model: With proprietary deal flow, the fund can choose to invest in projects it knows like the back of its hand. We’ll invest in ESG projects we don’t incubate, but we’ll have huge informational and logistical advantages when we do invest in incubator-linked projects. Since we’re mostly ESG entrepeneurs ourselves, the fund can operate as a real partner with ESG firms, not a pump-and-dump institutional investor that doesn’t understand the ESG space.

With the Bureau’s business scaling expertise & deep blockchain background, my research background on advanced models used in risk management, and the hedge fund’s full regulatory compliance & fund management expertise, we will be in a unique position to create and foster social good blockchain projects.

We’re very excited to be announcing all the details very soon!

Third, what this means for RootProject is we’ll have a wall of pretty intense institutional money at our back. The negative is that, to take advantage of this, we have to push our ICO back to January. We’ll settle on an exact date in the coming weeks.

Fourth, we are reducing the RootProject ICO hard cap to $27 million, with a total token stock of $110 million. We chose our initial hard cap when we were looking at the ICO process from the outside — and in a very different market context. After the pre-ICO, we began consultations with several big crypto investment funds, and settled on a hardcap and total token stock that they advised.

The goal is to make sure everyone who wants to participate can, but to also make sure that demand for the token outstrips supply, so there’s a good, permanent post-ICO “pop.” We know that a changed ICO date is not what our pre-ICO investors would like, but we owe it to them to do this right. By reducing our hard cap, we’re doing everything we can to protect their initial investment.

The lower hard cap reduces the number of pilot cities we can launch in year one. That’s a hard choice, given the nature of our work. But by proceeding prudently, we’re going to prove out a model that puts the power of investors and markets behind nonprofits — and that’s what’s most important.