GiveCrypto Monthly Update — April 2019: Empowering Four Venezuelan Communities with Crypto

KPIs

• New Ambassadors — 10
• New Recipients — 93
• Funds Transferred — $1,030

After six months of running experiments around the world, we are proud to have launched our first pilot program in Venezuela last week.

This initial phase of our Ambassador Pilot involves four relatively small trials in different cities and will run until early June. It aims to help 100 people in each city by connecting with them through an ambassador and giving them crypto for the food and household items they need.

As always, stay tuned to our Twitter account for weekly updates about the pilot.

Applying Our Ambassador Model to the Pilot Program

Our past experiments have shown that GiveCrypto’s model and mission work best in areas with broken economic systems. Within these communities, we’ve found that connecting with on-the-ground ambassadors gives us the ability to better understand the needs of the people we’re trying to help.

With this information in mind, our Venezuelan ambassadors will help identify recipients in four communities and teach them on how to use crypto.

We’re paying each participant $10 (in ETH) per week for six weeks. Both ambassadors and recipients will receive payments. A field operations contractor will manage each city and recruit vendors who will accept crypto and ambassadors who will use their local knowledge to identify needy recipients.

To make sure we track how crypto is impacting the lives of recipients, we’ll be asking income, food security and psychological well being questions before and after the pilot. Here is a summary of some of the initial pre-survey questions (from the first 42 respondents).

Most households earn less than $20 per month

Most have skipped a meal, almost half have gone a day without eating

Everybody is worried about access to medicine and food

In the second phase of the trial, we’ll focus on the best-performing city and expand to 1,000 participants. Additionally, we’ll recruit five to ten more vendors and begin experimenting with cash-out options.

We’ve already conducted customer-development calls with five ambassadors and seven recipients. The purpose of this work is to understand usage, validate targeting criteria and identify problems.

So far, the response has been good. Recipients haven’t had much trouble enrolling in the program or receiving/spending the cryptocurrency. The ambassadors are inviting their neighbors and the recipients are using the crypto to purchase food. When they do have issues (usually due to an older/incompatible phone), they have found workarounds like downloading the wallet to a family member’s phone.

We’ve also conducted blockchain analysis on the participant’s wallet IDs. Here is a summary of the participant’s transactions:

Most participants spent the funds at the recruited vendor

They generally spent the full $10

Creating a Platform to Support Our Efforts

One of the lessons we learned from our previous projects, which were generally managed by third parties, is that we need to run our own execution. Relying on a third party didn’t give us the necessary control or visibility. Over the past few months, we have invested significant time and effort building a platform that will facilitate the targeting and distribution of cryptocurrencies as well as track impact.

Wallet Lite

We collaborated with Coinbase to develop a wallet that is optimized for Venezuela. It offers the convenience and security of other wallets, with a few enhancements to make it more accessible for our participants:

• Spanish-language options
• Compatibility with Android 4.1 and above (reaching 96% of Android users in Venezuela)
• Smaller download size (half the size of the regular wallet)

Web Application

Our web application will allow participants (field operations, ambassadors, and recipients) to send invites, complete on-boarding flows, and receive notifications. The web app will help us track impact, crypto utility, and fraud. It will also feature a back-end dashboard for administrators to monitor activity.

While the web app is still in an early version and involves a number of manual processes, it will allow us to scale our impact while minimizing fraud.

Roadmap

Despite all we’ve done so far, we’re still figuring out the best way to build a distributed charity, and we have a lot of ground we want to cover. We expect most of this work will revolve around software development, automating the processes of targeting recipients, distributing crypto and tracking impact. As we see the initial results from our pilot program, we will embrace the lessons quickly and work to create a platform that helps recipients and provides us with the best data possible. Here are the projects that will be our focus for the remainder of Q2:

GiveCrypto.org’s Board

To help us set the best direction as we grow, we are in the process of recruiting an independent board for GiveCrypto.org. We recently created our first board deck to provide details on GiveCrypto’s progress to date and on our plans for the future. We decided that, in the spirit of transparency, we should share the board deck publicly. Your questions and suggestions are appreciated.

View the board deck

Hackathon

GiveCrypto participated in Coinbase’s recent hackathon and worked on a project that was inspired by Will Ruddick’s work with community currencies in Kenya.

Community currencies are not a new concept. The basic idea is that a new currency is created, issued, and used within a certain geographic area. The new currency is meant to be to be used in addition to (not instead of) the primary currency.

Will’s implementation is somewhat unique because he distributes the currency via local businesses, with two requirements:

1. The business must agree to accept payments in the community currency
2. The business must donate a percentage of the community currency to a social good project (e.g., planting trees or cleaning up trash)

Will’s work was so successful that he and his team were briefly detained by the Kenyan police for counterfeiting. They were quickly released and have continued to experiment with community currencies in sub-Saharan Africa.

For the hackathon, we decided to implement a community currency in Venezuela using an ERC20 token. In a few days, we were able to accomplish the following:

• Developed and launched an ERC20 token
• Convinced four vendors in Venezuela to accept the token
• Made our first sale a few hours after we started recruiting vendors

This is very exciting avenue for GiveCrypto, mostly due to the fact that we may be able to significantly increase our impact by issuing community currency tokens. If we can get this to work, our impact won’t be restricted by our fundraising.

We will continue experimenting with this concept and are currently recruiting 10 to 15 more vendors. Additionally, we’re going to incorporate a social-good project, allowing more people to receive the community currency.