Giveth
Type of site
Crowdfunding
Available inEnglish
Headquarters
Barcelona
,
Spain
OwnerGiveth DAO
Created byGriff Green
Jordi Baylina
URLgiveth.io
Launched2016 (2016)
Current statusActive

Giveth is a global fundraising platform in the Ethereum ecosystem that allows people to raise money in cryptocurrency for public goods projects, on five blockchains: Ethereum Mainnet, Polygon, Gnosis Chain, Celo, and Optimism. Donors on Giveth are rewarded for using the platform when they donate to verified projects, receiving GIV tokens in return, the native cryptocurrency of Giveth. A project becomes verified once it has submitted to a verification process that includes providing proof of its charitable nature.

Since 2017, over US$3.5 million has been raised on Giveth, and approximately $750,000 has been rewarded to its donors.

History

Giveth was founded by members of The Robinhood Group and The White Hat Group including Griff Green and Jordi Baylina. The Robinhood Group was responsible for altruistically hacking and returning the funds from the unprecedented crypto hack of The DAO in July 2016.[1] The Robinhood Group rescued over US$208 million in crypto, refusing any donations for their work.[2] Green was community manager at The DAO at the time of the July 2016 hack, and orchestrated The DAO fund recovery in cooperation with Vitalik Buterin and the Ethereum Foundation. He had previously created a “course for DAO ninjas” that proved effective in supporting the recovery.[3] Green was the first employee of Slock.it, the organization responsible for building The DAO and founding its legal entity (SARL) DAO.Link in Switzerland.[4]

Green remains fully active at Giveth, and Jordi Baylina is still in part responsible for smart contract writing at Giveth. Green earned a master's degree in Digital Currencies from the University of Nicosia in 2016, part of the first cohort to ever receive such a degree, with a focus on sharing economies.

Since 2018, Giveth participates in Burning Man each year in educating the public about the philanthropic and public goods value of crypto fundraising including introductions to what is blockchain and digital sovereignty at Camp Decentral.

Business Model

Individuals or collectives can freely create a project on Giveth and immediately begin raising and receiving funds. Projects must include contact information, a crypto wallet address where donations will be sent, project description, photos, and eventually updates.

Giveth is unique as a crowdfunding platform in that it does not touch or hold the funds that are donated, due to the nature of blockchain technology on which it is built. Donations move directly from the donor's crypto wallet to the project's crypto wallet without any intermediary such as a bank. The cryptocurrency is reflected (but not actually contained) in the crypto wallets and is decentrally stored on blockchain ledgers.

Giveth collects no fees from either donors or projects. Donors pay a “gas fee”, or crypto transaction fee, relative to the blockchain on which the donation is being made.

Based on the same non-traditional business model of transparency and collective participatory governance as The DAO, Giveth itself is a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization), such that its organization is recorded on a blockchain, and the overall structure is non-hierarchical, where no central authority controls DAO functionality, and contributors earn DAO governance voting rights in tokens.

Giveth has more than 2000 projects that originate from over 70 countries worldwide.

References

  1. ↑ Popper, Nathan (May 21, 2016). "A Venture Fund With Plenty of Virtual Capital, but No Capitalist". New York Times. Archived from the original on May 27, 2016.
  2. ↑ Pearson, Jordan (24 July 2017). How Coders Hacked Back to ‘Rescue’ $208 Million in Ethereum . Wired. From the original on 2017-07-24.
  3. ↑ Shin, Laura (2022). The Cryptopians: Idealism, Greed, Lies, and the Making of the First Big Cryptocurrency Craze. New York: Public Affairs. p. 156. ISBN 9781541763012.
  4. ↑ Waterss, Richard (May 17, 2016). "Automated company raises equivalent of $120M in digital currency". Financial Times. Archived from the original on November 8, 2020.
This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.