impactMarket joins Celo’s DeFi For the People to help empower billions

We are proud to announce that we are joining the Celo movement DeFi For the People, an organization focused on making decentralized finance accessible to everyone with a smartphone around the world. Our decentralized poverty alleviation and impact yield farming protocol aims to eradicate extreme poverty and joining forces is the way to reach those who need it most.

Blockchain is to many, as it is to us, a path to reach more people in a transparent, decentralized, and open way, eliminating middlemen and making sure we give a helping hand where it is most needed. In our case, we are helping communities in over 25 developing countries, from the mountains in Peru to refugee camps in Africa, from Brazilian favelas to farmer villages in the Philippines, and even in especially challenging contexts like Afghanistan and Yemen. But how is this possible?

The answer to this question is simple: DeFi (Decentralized Finance), an emerging financial technology that allows for money to be sent and received anywhere in the world — anyone with a smartphone can access the money and raise their finances.

This is why Celo launched the initiative DeFi For the People, to reach the potential of 6 billion people who have access to a smartphone (around 84% of the world’s population) and give them the power and opportunity to control their lives — satisfy basic needs, access education and better jobs, and so on. DeFi for the People wants to bring together developers, builders, tech companies, and anyone who can and wants to help out to create solutions to make DeFi accessible and simpler for everyone.

And this is where impactMarket comes in. Those who have been following us and our journey for a while may know that we are all about helping those in need, connecting donors to beneficiaries using blockchain technology with full transparency on-chain, no intermediaries, and no fees on donations — but we couldn’t have done it without Celo. Our poverty alleviation protocol works on the Celo network and we consider Valora as the wallet for beneficiaries and community managers, the Celo dollar for the UBI (Unconditional Basic Income) distributed, for the donations. So impactMarket and Celo go way back!

Joining the DeFi for the People is just another way for impactMarket to show it is an ally of the great causes, and it comes naturally to us since the initiative’s core values are aligned with our own: we are committed to reaching more and more people in need around the world in the combined efforts of “Prosperity for All”, Celo’s mission.

How does it work?

We are hoping you are asking about the DeFi For the People initiative, and that you have come this far already knowing how impactMarket works, right?

It’s simple, basically, it’s an open invitation by Celo to anyone who wants to partner with them, and now with us, to bring DeFi closer to everyone, by driving DeFi adoption to those who need it most and helping out the 10% of the population who live in extreme poverty (with under 1.9 dollars per day).

DeFi for the People is a collaboration between projects such as Aave, Curve, Sushi, 0x, Moola, Ubeswap, Mobius, and now impactMarket. All organizations that want to help build a DeFi ecosystem, encourage native mobile development and connect the DeFi concept to the notion of prosperity.

How is impactMarket already helping?

We are a protocol with DeFi in our core, being a decentralized financial infrastructure that enables anyone who wants to contribute to the communities or, when being in a condition of vulnerability, to receive unconditional basic income as a beneficiary through DeFi (even if they don’t understand it completely or at first).

ImpactMarket allows beneficiaries to access financial mechanisms through the platform, which would not otherwise be possible if not for blockchain technology (one of the most used forms of DeFi). Here, anyone can donate the amount they want to a particular community, then beneficiaries need to use a smartphone to withdraw the amount through exchange solutions or any places accepting cryptocurrencies as a way of payment.

So to put it simply, impactMarket is already using DeFi to help almost 25 thousand people from vulnerable communities around the world.

One of the most important aspects of the DeFi for the People program is connecting the idea of DeFi to real-world use cases, and impactMarket is an example of how to do this in a successful way. You can read this article to know more about what we are working on at the moment.

Apart from being a successful case of the UBI implementation, we have some other special things in line for the future of impactMarket. You can expect access to more financial services and education, such as microcredit, collective savings with rewards, crowdlending, and more financial tools that are essential to empower vulnerable communities out of extreme poverty, thus bringing DeFi to the people. In 10 years, we expect to reach one billion people who will be able to work their human potential already outside the poverty line.

You can also be part of the community, you just need a smartphone! 😉📱

If you have any questions, you can reach out to us at impactmarket.com, docs.impactmarket.com, or directly by emailing us at hello@impactmarket.com.

You can also find us on Medium, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, GitHub, Youtube, Telegram, and Discord.

Dare to dream with us!

You can be part of the change and empower people all around the world. Your contribution goes to the UBI communities, and when donating cUSD to a specific community or through the impact Farming page or to a specific community, you get $PACT tokens as a reward for the impact you´ll have made. You can also stake your $PACT to get even more rewards.

impactMarket (The Human Empowerment Protocol)

impactMarket provides accessible financial solutions to empower underprivileged people all over the world, unlocking opportunities and human potential. Our inclusive protocol is transparent, reliable, and borderless. It operates as a DAO on top of the Celo network, using $PACT as its governance token while running autonomously through smart contracts.

impactLabs (the company)

impactLabs Lda, based in Portugal, was founded in Nov 2020 by Marco Barbosa, Bernardo Vieira, Afonso Barbosa, and eSolidar. The company is focused on building accessible decentralized systems to unleash human potential and disrupt access to finance while driving DeFi adoption.