A Look Ahead: 2019

RootProject uses blockchain to bring the power of markets to nonprofit fundraising. Our crowdfunding platform facilitates a new form of campaign design that maximizes rewards to supporters and beneficiaries, creating replicable and recurrent paths to funding.

A Look Forward for RootProject in 2019

Focus = Scaling Up
After four successful small campaigns in 2018, we are spending much of early 2019 focused on assisting organizations running large campaigns: bringing stakeholders and outside organizations together to form deep-rooted coalitions capable of real change. On a tactical level, this must be our core competency — one that will be amplified as more parts of the system are decentralized.

The campaigns in the first half of the year will be larger in several ways: scope, dollars raised, stakeholder engagement, and tokens burned.

Each campaign contributes to building and testing parts of our core competency. While, of course, each of our campaign partners are meaningfully contributing to larger anti-poverty efforts.

Initial Campaigns -> Test Campaigns -> Large Campaigns With Decentralized Governance -> Large Campaigns AND Projects Governed by the RootProject Ecosystem

As we build on our core competency, we are building tech tools that will extend decentralized control not just to the campaigns themselves but the projects they fund.

The campaign for a blockchain school in Lagos, Nigeria, for example, will be our first real-world test of crowdfunding forks.

Civilytics will continue building data tracking of police behavior, an issue intimately tied to urban poverty in the United States.

Research
A serious attempt to build a community governed by a decentralized network of stakeholders requires a disciplined approach to the data environment that is created. In crypto, price data is vital. An attempt to build an incentive system that revolves around an economic asset must be serious about how markets operate.

In the next month we will be releasing to the public a 30 page research report that sums up some of our initial findings. We hope it will be of use to our backers, and crypto holders more generally.

Big Picture
We have learned some hard lessons this year. It is a difficult time for many projects whose underlying models are vastly more easy to scale and capable of attracting revenue than RootProject’s. We did not hit our hardcap, mandating that we rethink how to build such an ambitious project. Ecosystems based on market economies are difficult to build while people question existentially the value of the asset class (tokens) at the center of those economies. Yet RootShop and Judge Research are allowing RootProject to survive the crypto winter. New hires are coming in Q1 of 2019 for RootProject, even while vastly larger crypto projects are folding.