Play4Change Manifesto
OUR WHY
Financial Exclusion
There is a huge social inequality in the world due to the lack of access to the financial system by a large part of the population. There are over 1.7 billion people without access to banks and basic financial services.
Unemployment
The pandemic caused high unemployment rates around the world, mainly affecting the low-income population where working at home is not an option. Over 200 million unemployed people worldwide and over 15 million in Brazil. There are over 10 million people living in Favelas (Slums) in Brazil alone. Of the 200 million people living in Brazil, half are gamers, 15% were left unemployed because of the pandemic, and the remaining wages are falling 20% year on year.
Drug trafficking
Drug trafficking is unfortunately considered a real career in the underserved communities in Brazil. Teens start out earning between 10 and 20 dollars a week to deliver drugs, but they participate in a hierarchical structure that allows them to move up and increase their salaries, reaching up to 500 dollars a week if they continue to be “promoted”. The idea of P4C is precisely to reach these teenagers at the beginning of their “career”, where we believe that young people are not completely dazzled by the world of crime and when they see an alternative they can change their path.
Automation
Emerging technologies such as AI and Robotics will cause massive replacement of people in manual jobs. Upskilling and reskilling will be needed across multiple industries as over 60% of jobs will be automated.
OUR PURPOSE
Play4Change was born with the purpose of generating financial inclusion, educational empowerment and social transformation leveraging blockchain play 2 earn games. We are an organization that focuses on social impact in underrepresented communities in developing nations. Besides giving them opportunities to generate income we also hold educational sessions on a weekly basis covering hard skills such as blockchain, crypto, financial literacy, how to use digital wallets as well as soft skills like leadership, communication and creativity.
We believe that by creating environments where talents are prepared and matched with job opportunities we will have a positive impact across the entire community.
People that did not have bank accounts now are leapfrogging the system by using digital wallets and transforming their financial situation. We are seeing these young players find an alternative to improve their lives with crypto and blockchain games. Games offer a door to enter this new web3 world, learn about crypto and our community is changing their realities.
We are also educating public and private institutions on the importance of Bitcoin as an alternative to our existing fiat currencies, on the value of web3 to bring power back to the people and reverting the negative image of cryptocurrencies as a whole in Brazil brought by the traditional media.
HOW
We use decentralized games to impact people’s lives in a positive, constructive and fun way. The new “Play To Earn” model enabled by Blockchain is transforming the way we play online, allowing players to participate in the distribution of profits generated by games through cryptocurrencies.
We believe becoming a DAO will be fundamental for the future success of Play4Change, giving ownership to the community participants and to make this movement outlast all of us. Having a decentralized governance system will create trust and resiliency for the community to survive attacks from countries with authoritarian governments and avoid corruption from centralized decision making within our own organization. This will also allow us to remotely coordinate more effectively and increase our positive impact over time.
User ownership promotes financial inclusion by making people owners and democratic voters in the platforms they use, DAOs are the future of human and machine coordination. NFTs provide on-chain identity and reputation for DAO contributors; DeFi gives DAO members massive liquidity pools of capital to govern; and scaling solutions like Harmony will make on-chain governance economically feasible.
Why blockchain games
The gaming industry is being reinvented by the web3 tools and leveraging the power of NFTs to bring digital property and ownership to the players allowing them to actively participate in this economy earning cryptocurrencies as they progress within the game. According to Exame, Brazil is the fifth country on the planet with the highest number of gamers and consumption of electronic games. It is also the biggest market of mobile gaming in Latin America. By knowing this potential we realized that blockchain games would be the gateway for people to join the web3 movement, learn about this new economy and participate in it.
Besides generating income and fun, blockchain games are also an excellent tool to introduce the cryptocurrencies universe to these young crowds from underserved communities that could potentially be the last one benefiting from it due to their current access to information and to the financial system. We validated that leveraging the simple language of games we would facilitate this process of onboarding people to download a digital wallet and enter the decentralized finance world naturally without prior advanced knowledge of finance or economics.
Blockchain games have been our main ally to generate financial inclusion, educational empowerment and social transformation in underserved communities in developing nations.
Leapfrogging
We believe blockchain can empower the population without access to banks to leapfrog the very costly and archaic banking system and have access to previously inaccessible financial services. Once they learn about bitcoin they change their mindset to a more low time preference one where we look more into our future selves and take important actions in the present. When our money is not being devalued with time we get out of survival mode and see a more abundant world. We want to show them that if they invest time learning about web3 and interacting with these new protocols they will also be able to provide value to the ecosystem and benefit from them.
Although they have no access to the regular financial system, they do own smartphones which have one of the highest penetration rates in Brazil. With P4C we are actually already seeing this change, where people from the very deep places inside the favelas in Rio de Janeiro are using Metamask, Ronin and Binance to receive their tokens from the play to earn games and making decisions if they want to convert into FIAT money or reinvest in other blockchain related projects. A few months ago they were excluded from the financial system and part of the “non-accredited” investors bucket but now they are becoming more sophisticated investors than those considered “accredited”.
