AidCoin’s agenda for 2019: what’s next?
2018 was very successful for AidCoin (read about our year’s results here) and we aren’t going to lower the bar in 2019 even if it’s most likely going to take more efforts. We are well aware that such market situation slows down the immediate adoption as first, there are not many donors who’d like to let go of their crypto when its price is at the all-time low. And second, it takes time for charities to embrace this new way of raising and managing funds and the current reputation of crypto & ICO sphere deters them from trying it.
At the same time though, this situation poses a great opportunity! We’re lucky to be the pioneers in the sector and have the time to further improve our product so that when the demand comes — and it surely will — we’ll be perfectly prepared to respond to it! That’s why in the near future, we plan to mainly focus on tech development, educating & onboarding top-notch charities, and refining the legal aspects to be as compliant in all our activities as currently possible. Here are the main directions we will be working on:
Integration with CharityStars
We’ve always been using our founding company’s experience and connections but in 2019, we aim to even further integrate our projects. We will mainly focus on 2 things:
- Attracting CharityStars users & reducing the AID supply;
It’s extremely hard to find individual donors from the crypto sphere these days but we found a way around it: we can still drive AidCoin & AIDChain adoption by creating extra incentives for CharityStars’ users to stake AID. One of the ways to do so is by suggesting them to open ERC20 wallets right in their personal cabinets on CharityStars and offering them AID tokens whenever they win auctions. Where will these tokens come from? We’ll use a percentage of CharityStars’ profits to regularly buy them on exchanges. Then, if a user does open a wallet, he will receive his AID tokens and either stake them to get discounts from final bids on CharityStars & access exclusive auctions (see the picture above) or just spend them to pay for the auctions. If he doesn’t open a wallet within a given timeframe — we will burn these tokens to reduce the AID token supply so that in the end, users of both platforms win. - Incentivizing CharityStars’ charities to join AIDChain;
We will also put more effort into making CharityStars’ charities accept the final bids of CharityStars’ auctions in stable coins. This way, more and more CharityStars’ charities will register on AIDchain and spend donations in a fully transparent way, staking AID to use the service and driving the number of AIDChain real use-cases.
Moreover, considering that CharityStars raises on average 5–6 mln EUR each year, this activity can really ramp up the crypto donation amounts even without the need to attract any external donors. In this regard, having CharityStars gives us a huge advantage over our competitors for whom finding crypto donors is really hard in the bear market.
Reviewing tech Roadmap
At this stage, tech development as important as business development. Here’s an update on our roadmap and a brief introduction to our development plans for 2019:
1. Timelines change;
So far we’ve been following all our development plans but there are two alterations in our roadmap. First, there was one extra feature we had to deliver out-of-schedule after digging deeper into charities’ needs. 2018 has revealed an unprecedented potential of crypto to be volatile, which turned off most of the charities we talked to and became a major stumbling block on the way to AIDChain wide adoption. Because of this, we had to change the way AIDPay works and convert all donations or a part of them into stable coins instead of AID and then also slightly revise the AID token economy (read more about it here).
Second, considering the current market situation, delivering the AIDChain mobile app is not so relevant and we decided to postpone it from Q2 2019 to focus on more high priority tasks.
2. Revision of the Donation Tracking System and the Send&Notify feature;
Since this new top-priority task popped up, we didn’t have time to develop the “Send & Notify” feature in Q3 2018. In fact, now we’re going to revamp the whole Donation Tracking System (DTS) cause reserving donations in stable coins is crucial for our product’s success and thus we can’t introduce an ERC721 token. The new DTS will be based on the FIFO method (first in, first out): the money that the charity receives will be spent in chronological order allowing us to easily track whose money is being spent at any given moment.
Here’s an example: Jane donates 100 DAI to Alice for Children and then Sam donates 70 DAI. At some point, Alice for Children decides to use this money to buy 22 chairs 5 DAI each (110 DAI). When the charity pays for the chairs, it spends the first donation that arrived in its wallet — Jane’s money — and since Jane’s money is not enough, it also takes 10 DAI from the next donation batch that came from Sam. In this case, our DTS will notify Jane that her entire donation was used to buy chairs and notify Sam that 10 DAI out of the 70 he donated were used to buy chairs. This method of tracking funds is simple yet effective so our DTS will work well even without a non-fungible token.
Onboarding charities
Finding incentives for CharityStars’ charities to join AIDChain is just half of the deal. Big international charities, which are our main goal, have a very high level of bureaucracy, restricted maneuverability, and a rather low appetite for innovation. As a result, even given CharityStars’ years-long relationships with these charities, it takes months to get things going. In the end, there’s a whole bunch of activities we need to undertake to onboard them, including the organization of educational seminars and preparing a comprehensive legal package.
By “a comprehensive legal package” we mean a whole bunch of documents that this kind of organizations requests from us to start using AIDChain and accept crypto donations. Most importantly, we need to prepare a solid agreement outlining the terms of use of AIDChain and a detailed documentation on all basic aspects of using crypto as most charities’ employees are not familiar with the topic. While we’re almost through with the latter task, the former one is not as easy as it seems. We’ve been trying to do it since our very ICO but current legislations worldwide still don’t contain answers to some important questions. For instance, how will charities include crypto donations in their balances? And then, how should AIDChain interface and registration process respond to it to be legally compliant? We already had to put brakes on an agreement with a major charity just because the legal base was not there but we hope that 2019 will finally see some breakthroughs in the legislation making. And even if it doesn’t, we will put all our creativity to respond to charities’ requests and create agreements that are as comprehensive as currently possible.
Summary
These are not all our plans for 2019 but rather just a quick overview for our community to understand where we’re moving. We have already launched two real projects in Africa and Latin America that showed an unprecedented level of transparency but that was just the very beginning. Overall, we aim to focus on long-term goals, put all connections & technologies in place and create a solid and compliant product so that when the new crypto wave comes, we are prepared to catch it. We are sure that 2019 will be as exciting as 2018 if not better so thank you all for staying with us and get prepared for more achievements soon!
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