JCF Mar. 2020 Update: Thousands of Social Impact Funds for a Poverty-free Future
Greetings!
Recently we’ve seen even larger impacts of the COVID-19 virus on world economics, with U.S. stock market crashing, and also the crypto market falling 40–50% in a week. These are all presumably negative news. However, like all things, there’s always another side that, if we choose to look at it, may create hopes and a brighter future.
For universal basic income (UBI) advocates, a very positive development just happened. The U.S. government is now considering to hand USD 1,000 to Americans who might be hit by job losses due to the outbreak, effectively initiating small-scale UBI in U.S.. Facebook too, is handling free money to help employees to get over the crisis.
We at JCF started as a private sector effort to make basic income universal, by investing in the top 10 cryptos with an index fund vehicle. Part of our assumption is that state-sponsored UBI may not happen any time soon. Apparently the virus crisis has quicken the pace, and it’s a welcoming sign that more people are now willing to consider the merits of UBI.
Here’s a quick update of our last month’s progress:
- Bitcoin dropped from USD $10,161 to $5,222 (or a 48% drop) between Feb. 19 to Mar. 19 2020, while JCF’s Net Asset Value (NAV) dropped from USD $117.95 to $82.45 (a 30% drop). A particular hard hit happened between Mar. 11–14, when BTC dropped from 7,900 to 5,660 (a 28.4% drop), while JCF’s drop was only from $92.63 to $84.79 (7.84%). Why the difference? Because we started to implement an “exit all positions” strategy when technical indicators show that the overall market is going down (a bearish market).
- Our Feb. 2020 re-balancing and dividend payment was executed smoothly as planned. The monthly Return on Investment (RoI) in terms of JCF tokens is 1.13% for our topmost token holder (who holds 33~34% of the total). However, the bottom-most token holder (who holds 0.04%, or about USD $10, or minimal entry value to the fund), had an RoI of 98.55% (or about USD $10 of value in dividend received). This again shows the aggressive wealth re-distribution of the JCF design.
- Last but not least, we are in the process of extracting the JCF mechanisms so that it may apply to other types of assets. The core philosophy of JCF still holds, but it’ll allow more opportunities and possibilities for people to invest, allowing asset owners or fund managers to offer their values to a wider group of people, previously unreachable.
We’ll explain in more details the above updates.
New “Exit-All” Safety Mechanism
We’d like to build JCF to be the safest and most accessible crypto investment vehicle, so we’ve done quite a bit of tuning and design changes to improve our safety continuously.
Our safety strategy is worth explaining a bit: besides pure “cryptos” which may be based on people’s trust or expected utility, there are what’s called “stable coins” tied directly to fiat currency such as the U.S. dollar, Euros, Japanese Yen, etc. We thus can exit our asset holding and park them as stable coins, when the crypto market is going down, thus effectively avoiding unnecessary losses. When the market appears to be up again, we will then enter the position, still as a top 10 crypto index.
This way we’ll only activate the “wealth accumulating” aspect of JCF when the overall market is going up, and will enter a more conservative “wealth retaining” mode given a market downturn.
Generalized Asset Tokens
JCF actually has two parts to it: one is the assets being invested and managed, to accumulate wealth effectively, the other is an automatic way to re-distribute the profits earned, so all token holders can benefit in such a way that their basic living may be protected off the dividend payments of the fund.
The current JCF invests in the top 10 cryptos, and is growing user and fund size continuously. However, not everyone may agree to crypto’s future, but may be more inclined to invest in more traditional asset classes such as real estate, land, or arts and antique collections.
We thus realized that JCF’s vision may have more space to grow, and may realize sooner than we anticipated. The basic idea is to still use the overall JCF framework and design, but use invested crypto assets to invest in other asset classes, in a more general way.
Imagine that some real estate owners in South America may be willing to share the property ownership and rental revenue with international investors. Assuming that the legal structures are all okay, this owner may be able to work with JCF to release some Real Estate Tokens that can be purchased internationally via Ethereum.
All other aspects would be similar to how JCF currently works: any profits gain would be moved to a “dividend pool” that pays out monthly dividends to token holders, and part of the dividends received may be required to be donated to other parties for social causes. To invest in such real estate tokens there is still 0% entry or maintain fee, and anyone can take part by putting just USD $10 in it!
Obviously all the local laws in respective jurisdictions will need to be complied, and such services will likely be restricted to certain geographic or total number of participants. So it may not be as public or open as the main JCF crypto fund.
However, the possibilities this will open may be endless! And people may also decide to build various community-based funds, where perhaps only family members or close associates can participate, while the joint pool of profits are shared across (and helped across) all fund participants.
We envision there may be potentially hundreds to thousands of such funds be built, leveraging both new ways to pool together capital, investing in worthwhile investment vehicles, while allowing a community of people to benefit financially, and achieving the financial freedom and protection we may all need in the coming future.
For those interested, here are the more detailed parameters we’ve identified that will be extracted and are tune-able for each individual fund, in what’s currently tentatively called the WEALTH framework (Worldwide Electronic Assets Long-term Token Holding).
- asset type: (types of asset, ex. real estate / art / options)
- owner type: (who is the asset owner, ex. company / individual)
- update period: (how often is total asset value updated, ex. daily / hourly / x min)
- total token: (maximum number of tokens releasable, ex. 1,000,000,000)
- profit ratio: (how much profit goes into “dividend pool”, ex. 100%)
- dividend ratio: (how much of “dividend pool” is paid out monthly, ex. 25%)
- shared ratio: (ratio of “shared dividend” paid across all holders equally, ex. 50%)
- team ratio: (ratio of how much dividend goes to support operation, ex. 2%)
- manager ratio: (ratio of how much dividend goes to manager, ex. 1%)
- donation ratio: (ratio of how much dividend must be donated, ex. 7%)
- referral ratio: (ratio of dividend given to referral, if any, ex. 1%)
- exit ratio: (ratio of withdraw fee to support operations, ex. 2%)
We’d be happy to hear from you on this new direction, and let us know if you might be interested to explore building social impact funds with JCF’s working systems and structures!
Please feel free to leave a message, send to contact@jcf.world, or post to our FB page. Thanks to all your support and let’s build a more generous world together, by making basic income as universal as possible!
