Happy Birthday, CryptoCare!
We are Phillip and JP, and we are a pair of creative technologists from NYC working on Ethereum dapps, and today we’re proud to announce the launch of CryptoCare—a platform to gamify social impact using crypto collectibles.
How it began
After leaving our e-commerce jobs, we wanted to use our skills for good. Phillip had been delving into Ethereum and continually piqued JP’s interest with his learnings — and thus we fell into the rabbit hole of this emerging technology.
We were drawn to the Ethereum platform for many reasons, but we were specifically inspired by the collaborative nature of the community. Alex Miller (from Grid+) sums up part of what excited us about this new world:
“I think the collaborative nature is unique. It’s much more collaborative than most spaces, and much of that has to do with shared economic incentives. Everyone who owns Ether is incentivized to make the system better. When you put a bunch of smart people with technical skill sets into the same ecosystem with shared incentives, you can iterate very quickly and build cool things. I think that’s a big reason for why we’re seeing the adoption of Ethereum go up very quickly.”
In addition, Ethereum provides more than just a currency — that’s just one of its many possible applications. It provides a framework for owning digital assets, the ability to navigate the web in a trustless and secure manner, and has the most robust tooling and set of builders making incredible new dapps every week.
Social Impact
We weren’t initially sure what to build, but we were aligned that we wanted to build something meaningful.
We think the world was collectively shocked (creators included) with the hype created by CryptoKitties. While adorable and a clever application of the technology, essentially people were spending millions of dollars purchasing digital images of cats. Non-fungible tokens were popping up and crypto-collectibles was gaining more traction.
Through social listening, we noted a trend of folks in the crypto community asking how they could donate their new capital to meaningful causes. We were inspired by the anonymous donor behind the Pineapple Fund, who recently donated tens of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency to charities around the world.
We decided to build a platform that encourages more people to do similar altruistic deeds on a small to large scale, as every penny counts for these missions to succeed. This platform would use these collectible tokens to gamify philanthropy and make supporting mission-driven organizations a more enjoyable experience. In addition, we would raise awareness of impact-driven and technologically-forward organizations, increase the exchange of Ether on decentralized applications, and strengthen Ethereum’s social impact community.
The Experience
The current experience of giving lacked emotional design. We started the project by making out a rough prototype to start figuring out how to add some joy to the process of donating to mission-driven organizations and the receipt of a crypto-collectible.
Initially, we wanted to open the platform to people outside of the Ethereum community, but as the technology is still being developed and understood by the world, there is a large barrier to entry for lay-people. Given that, we decided our first phase of users would be the niche group of dapp developers and users. This made user research and testing was more of a challenge as it made for a much smaller testing pool.
We took a visual direction that is appealing to our target users but also stands out from the increasingly homogenized aesthetics of today’s world wide web. We’ll share out more details on the design and testing process in a future article. Big thanks to all who helped!
The Technology
Once we had the outline of a simple yet enjoyable giving experience that resonated with folks, we started figuring out our architecture.
We built the frontend using React and Web3.js, developed the smart contracts to store the ERC721 tokens and route payments to the beneficiaries, and created a light layer of backend code, using Node and Ruby on Rails, for verifying input data, signing transactions, and surfacing the on-chain data via an API. We store all of the token metadata with IPFS, which means anyone can create new experiences with the CryptoCare tokens without relying on any of our backend systems, and the users will always own their data.
Our Partners
Once we had a functional (enough) front-end, we scoured the web to find charities that were impactful and technologically savvy. It actually proved more difficult than we imagined. So it was even more refreshing that our communications with each of the organizations were delightful. It was amazing to hear about each groups interest, knowledge, and desired applications for blockchain tech. And we’re proud to list as our platform’s beneficiaries (in no particular order): Electronic Frontier Foundation, GiveDirectly, and Heifer International, 350.org, WildMe, Rainforest Foundation US, GRACEaid, Fight for the Future, and Freedom of the Press Foundation.
Things to come
We’re keeping our marketing grassroots and sharing CryptoCare with members of the Ethereum community in a more personal way. We’ve had more organizations interested in joining, but at this time want to continue to promote and drive traffic to the site, observe and learn from how people are interacting. We have a few paths we’d like to take but want our user base to help light the path. After all, the technology is still developing itself! So stay tuned and don’t hesitate to get in touch.
In the meantime, please:
Visit the site to adopt and support a mission you believe in!
Follow CryptoCare on twitter.
