The Next Era: GoodDollar’s Roadmap to Ecosystem Expansion
Introduced three years ago, the GoodDollar protocol’s vision has always strived to close the growing wealth gap arising from deep-rooted systemic barriers, contributing to ongoing socioeconomic disparities. GoodDollar began as a mission-driven blockchain experiment in the real world, introducing a fresh perspective to solving one of humanity’s oldest concepts, Universal Basic Income (UBI).
Three years in the game, GoodDollar has established itself as a proven economic paradigm, becoming the preeminent crypto-based Universal Basic Income protocol, with an expansive reach of over 590,000 unique recipients and total UBI disbursements exceeding $435,000, across 181 emerging economies.
GoodDollar leverages decentralized finance (DeFi) to build a community-powered framework that sustainably funds, creates, and distributes crypto UBI globally to anyone with an internet-enabled device. Real people worldwide looking to create economic opportunities for themselves and their communities are using GoodDollar to encourage financial education, experimentation, and empowerment.
And we’re just getting started.
Purpose, Drive, and Value
Our mission of alleviating socioeconomic inequality and financially empowering individuals and communities is at the heart of everything we do. The ambitious approach to creating an inclusive and equitable world requires us to build off our previous roadmap, amplifying our UBI infrastructure, core protocol, enabling more use cases through interfaces, and showing the power of a circular economy based on commerce, matching needs, and goods.
Good Labs Foundation, the foundation that has long been the initiator and prominent contributor to the GoodDollar protocol, established the bedrock for GoodDollar’s initial infrastructure and ecosystem: protocol, GoodWallet, GoodDapp, and charged with setting an initial vision for the GoodDAO. This stage of the roadmap signifies GoodDollar’s Expansion Era, marked by the aim to expand the protocol by encouraging builders, projects, supporters, and community members to shape the future of GoodDollar.
We envision the path to creating an even richer holistic UBI ecosystem by driving toward the following goals:
- Expand G$ utility for real people
- Enable a framework for segmented UBI capabilities based on member and community identity
- Simplify the support process to make it easier to support key GoodDollar communities and member segments
- Expand development and local capacity by empowering the GoodDAO by setting up a grant capacity
Now’s your time to get creative and shape the GoodDollar experience you’ve always envisioned. Think of our Roadboard as a blueprint — an actionable guide detailing Good Lab’s strategic deployment plan toward ecosystem expansion. Parallel to this, the Wishlist serves as a space for inspiration and imagination, setting the stage for you to build on GoodDollar or formulate your own innovative ideas.
To help our community bring their ideas to life, GoodDollar will provide financial and educational resources through upcoming grants and hackathons. Let’s dive into the key goals and discover how we can create a thriving GoodDollar landscape — and what this all means for you!
Unlocking More G$ Utility for Real People
The GoodDollar community is expansive and diverse, with over 590,000 unique UBI claimers worldwide. To truly promote financial inclusion, the next logical progression is continuously driving momentum towards creating more opportunities for everyday people to use their G$ and enabling local communities and markets to shape how GoodDollar is used in their local context.
GoodDollar expanded onto the Celo blockchain based on shared values of using blockchain to create a regenerative digital economy that benefits real people in emerging markets in search of new fintech solutions and systems of exchange. The expansion opened up new avenues for people to use their G$ UBI tokens in Celo’s dApp ecosystem, such as participating in HaloFi’s high-yield savings challenges and claiming soulbound Celo domain names with Masa, providing more options for individuals to engage their G$ onchain.
To accelerate this work, GoodLabs is committed to advancing the integration of G$ into Celo-based dApps, making the process effortless, affordable, and scalable. Developing robust SDKs and APIs and fostering deeper synergies with existing dApps in the Celo ecosystem will make it simpler for other dApps and projects to integrate G$ and access our 600,000+ community. By integrating G$ UBI, we effectively lower the barriers to entry, making it easier for people to explore new dApps.
Over the years, ambitious community leaders have used G$ to capitalize on opportunities, creating on-the-ground endeavors tailored to their local region’s needs. Brazilian entrepreneur Christiane revolutionized her favela’s economy with a G$-currency storefront, creating revenue-generating streams, providing accessible resources, and enabling all regional community members to buy and sell goods with G$ tokens. Meanwhile, Ghanaian student Faisal created a digital marketplace that buys and sells airtime minutes with G$ tokens. These examples represent the types of physical and virtual projects we aim to scale worldwide.
GoodDollar has always been a protocol for the people. We invite builders to push the boundaries of GoodDollar’s UBI protocol and unveil new possibilities for advancement and integration. To support our enterprising community, we’re creating funding and knowledge pathways through grant programs and hackathons to inspire and develop the next generation of breakthrough ideas. Our focus will be on advancing local market solutions, digital enterprises like virtual services and e-commerce, and blockchain-based services, all while integrating G$ into their respective business models. Complementing these tracks will be spaces for peer-to-peer support and mentorship from GoodDollar’s network of industry leaders.
For those inspired by GoodDollar’s dual impact — both onchain and real-world applications — we’re thrilled to announce upcoming opportunities to participate.
Keep an eye out for announcements about the GoodDollar Prosperity Grants Program, Funding the Commons Hackathon, the upcoming Superfluid Wave scheme, and other ways to get involved.
Leveling Up Segmented UBI Capabilities
GoodDollar started with the goal of making Universal Basic Income accessible to anyone with an internet-enabled device. Today, GoodDollar is the leading blockchain UBI protocol, with over 100,000 weekly active members claiming G$ UBI daily.
Although having access to daily G$ UBI benefits many recipients, the mission of GoodDollar is to continue to enable money to flow to the people and places that need it most. We can only progress toward a more equitable society by recognizing the systemic factors that disproportionately impact different groups today. While daily universal G$ disbursements distribute resources uniformly and unconditionally to anyone, enabling a framework for segmented UBI would provide increased and targeted resources directly to different population segments based on those that are optimizing usage of GoodDollar and maximizing impact for these specific groups.
Earlier this year, GoodDollar, Appropriate Design, the Climate Collective, and dOrg joined forces to create GoodCollective. The GoodCollective has initiated the first Direct Payments Pilot Program through targeted UBI distribution in the form of Conservation Basic Income (CBI) payments. GoodCollective is a decentralized platform for segmented UBI run atop GoodDollar’s universal basic income infrastructure, focused on a climate impact use case that enables direct digital payments to individuals performing verified environmental stewardship work.
The platform has been launched in collaboration with DeTrash/Neduc and Silvi, our on-the-ground pilot implementation partners. The pilot tests a model for incentivizing verifiable climate-positive activities through direct CBI payments to a segmented group of local environmental stewards in key conservation regions.
On-site implementation partners are crucial for testing and expanding GoodCollective’s local impact. With established roots in their communities and systems to measure and verify climate activities, partners help us bring the technology infrastructure alive with real people in the field. Our strategy aims to augment GoodCollective’s segmented UBI capacity to provide funding for Collective pools created by the community, expand the scope of conservation impact pilots, and streamline public donations to segmented UBI pools based on user’s identity: location, gender, age, and more.
GoodDollar is poised to become the standard decentralized protocol for social responsibility, impact funding, economic inclusivity, and targeted support for emergency crises and marginalized groups worldwide, based on its direct payments system linked to a unique, verified identity.
Developing segmented UBI capabilities takes GoodDollar’s infrastructure to the next level, enabling more opportunities for partners and projects to engage in our interoperable ecosystem. GoodCollective’s segmented UBI framework demonstrates one of many possibilities for creating large-scale ecosystems using the GoodDollar protocol, and serves as one of the many foundational works enabling the protocol to effectively direct funds to the right people at the right time.
To boost the effectiveness of GoodCollective’s outreach, we must continue cultivating partnerships with donors and environmental impact partners working in critical regions. Any potential partners who feel compelled by GoodCollective’s mission and see a collaborative future with us — we invite you to take the first step.
Complete our partnership interest form and take the first step towards a transformative journey together.
Streamlining Support for GoodDollar
GoodDollar’s decentralized UBI protocol was designed to provide sustainable and scalable G$ UBI in the form of G$. Rooted in a mission towards financial inclusion and reducing the widening wealth gap, the issuance of a reserved-backed, low-volatility cryptocurrency is critical to ensuring the continuous well-being of GoodDollar recipients. Central to GoodDollar’s efficacy, GoodReserve plays a pivotal role in maintaining the relative stability and liquidity of G$.
Enhancing the resilience of the GoodReserve is critical to GoodDollar. Good Labs will create mechanisms that facilitate a more straightforward user journey to support the GoodDollar protocol by accepting various contributions and donation types to the Reserve, including fiat donations. These improvements will make supporting GoodDollar easier for a wide range of individuals and will underpin the long-term stability and sustainability of G$ UBI.
The GoodDollar ecosystem is a self-sustaining economy that offers collective growth and new forms of collaboration. By integrating principles of universal basic income and community currencies, the GoodDollar ecosystem is a living example of an alternative economic model that rewards members for engaging with a people-owned currency.
We’re aware that there’s a global community that’s passionate about championing these innovative approaches. Our role is to streamline the process, making it as effortless as possible for these individuals to support the project.
Supercharging Capacity Through GoodDAO Empowerment
From the very start, GoodDollar has been described as “a people-powered framework to generate, finance, and distribute global basic income.” At the center of this ecosystem is GoodDAO, the governance protocol that governs the GoodDollar protocol, to which all GoodDollar community members belong. As GoodDollar transitions to its next era of strategic development, it’s essential to expand the capabilities of the GoodDAO and its ability to meaningfully contribute to the growth of the protocol. The emphasis will be on facilitating funding capabilities and empowering local initiatives.
GoodDollar Ambassadors are emerging leaders prioritizing financial inclusion and working diligently within their communities for professional and communal advancement. Our next step is to transfer the nomination and election of these Ambassadors to the GoodDAO, aligning with our vision of community-led governance. By elevating Ambassadors to DAO leaders, we create a course toward a robust distributed leadership structure, leading to an increasingly decentralized landscape representative of the community it serves.
We see Ambassadors as future GoodDollar country leaders and delegates, taking charge of community-related funding decisions through DAO-related grants, influencing the protocol’s future and how it’s deployed on a per region, country, and community level.
Grants aim to foster innovation and entrepreneurship within the community by offering various funding and educational avenues. This includes the GoodDollar Prosperity Grants Program and the Funding the Commons Hackathon, among others. Upcoming initiatives like the Superfluid Wave are also on the horizon.
Through our roadmap, we aim to ignite both trust and enthusiasm for what lies ahead in GoodDollar’s journey. If you’re feeling inspired and can’t wait to bring your big ideas to life, we invite you to join the GoodDollar movement!
Keep an eye out as we roll out more ways to get involved. In the meantime, check out our comprehensive Roadboard and connect with us to stay up-to-date on the latest opportunities. Let’s shape the next era of our collective futures together!
