GiveCrypto Monthly Update — June 2020

Updates on the crypto donation marketplace and week 10 RCT numbers

Number of People Helped — 4,217

Operational Efficiency — 50.8%

Fraud Rate — 0.8%

Note — these numbers are for the entirety of Phase 4 of the Venezuelan Ambassador Program (March — June)

Crypto Donation Marketplace

As described in last month’s update, we have decided to refocus GiveCrypto’s efforts on a crypto donation marketplace. This will be a web app that allows anybody to give and/or request crypto. The app will be similar to services like Kiva, DonorsChoose and GoFundMe, but will be run entirely on cryptocurrency and funds will go directly from the donors to the recipients.

We are finalizing the feature set for v1 and will begin implementation next week. The functionality for this initial version is deliberately limited as we want to quickly get users on the service and learn from their feedback.

V1 will include basic implementations of the following user flows:

• Create funding request and explain how the crypto will be used
• Discover and vote on funding requests (requests will be surfaced based on their vote score)
• Donate crypto to funding requests (funds sent directly to user that made the request)

We are excited to get this service into the market and iterate based on user feedback.

The Marketplace’s Atomic Unit

While designing the marketplace, we debated quite a bit about the service’s atomic unit. Here is a great post by Fred Wilson explaining the atomic unit concept. To summarize, every service should focus on one atomic unit and revolve the service around that unit. For example, Twitter’s atomic unit is the tweet and Instagram’s atomic unit is the photo. We ultimately decided that the funding request would be our atomic unit.

Not only did we feel that the funding request is the right item to revolve things around (as we are a donation marketplace), we also felt that the funding request will generate the most compelling content. The funding requests will incorporate aspects of the recipient’s personality and tell the story of how a prospective donor can help. Most of the content that is displayed in the app will involve aspects of the funding request.

For v1, the funding request will only consist of a few fields and a photo. However, we envision a future where more texture is added to the funding request; periodic updates, video, 3rd party auditing and post funding impact tracking.

Update on the RCT

We are almost done with phase 4 of the Venezuelan Ambassador Program. This phase includes a randomized controlled trial and launched in late March. The last set of payments will be sent the week of July 6th. So far, we have collected three rounds of impact data, asking questions about food security, psychological well being and COVID related behavior changes. We will collect one more round of impact data after all payments have been sent.

Here is the summarized impact data from the first three rounds of surveys.

At week 10, both cash and crypto treatment significantly improve food security compared to control.

At week 10, cash is shown to improve psychological well being compared to control (though to a lesser extent than on food security); crypto also improves psychological well being but to a smaller degree, and the result is statistically insignificant.

The treatments have no impact on social distancing as measured by how often people leave home in the past week.

Staying Connected

As always, we love to hear from our donors and supporters outside of our updates and events. Please follow along on Twitter and our blog for updates on our programs.