Delivering Basic Income on Ethereum

Transcript

so so hi everybody my name is tomer i'm the protocol lead of kutola and today i'm going to talk to you about how do we use ethereum to deliver ubi to any person with a smartphone yes we know it's a bit ambitious um i'll start with a bit about my background and how did i get to where i am today uh i started my journey of crypto somewhere around 2013-14 i was studying psychology and economics and i was surprised about the fact that in psychology we were talking about about social structures and as if social structure is something that is standalone

it's exist in a vacuum and on the other side of the map studying economics and was surprised to see that we're talking about economics as a mean to grow our product not as a mean to shape our society in blockchain i kind of like find my connection between the two and that's what brock brought me into cuddle in my past been to some other projects as well our vision generally speaking is a world where everyone has a crypto basic income and the financial knowledge to use it the reason we are saying crypto basic income and not just basic income is that i don't think there

is a more misleading term than the underbanked or the unbanked it hints that if only we'll give them a bank you will solve their problems something we don't really agree with we do believe that by building a new financial system using cryptocurrencies and supplying ubi in that financial system and with giving people the financial education we can break some of the problems that exist today that i will talk about in a second a bit about good dollar first of all good dollars a hundred percent non-for-profit founded by yoni asia and fully supported by ito um we are 100 for lunch no pre-minting

for the team no pre-printing for the donors the good dollar no pre-meeting of the governance token everything all our minting is part of an ecosystem and an incentive structure that we have built so that's something was important for us and third we are an open innovation meaning everything we develop is an open source and open for the use of others when we say it's open source it's not because we think it's cool it's because we truly believe that building an inclusive economy is not something we can do by our own we want people to take part of our code and use it to their own vision we need people to connect their protocols to our protocol in order for us to fulfill our mission and that's mainly the goal of this talk

today to find people we can collaborate with in building and fulfilling our vision let's talk a bit about our problem the cycle of poverty poverty is a vicious complex problem that is a bit above my ability to explain but i can tell you that no one can fulfill himself economically if you need to think about how does he get food on his children's table tomorrow morning and that's kind of like some the cycle of poverty in my mind in a simple words um we believe one solution to that problem could be the basic

income let's talk a bit about what is basic income generally speaking and related to our project it's about giving people cash on a periodic level to anyone with no conditions here is money do whatever you want with it and don't worry you will be there next time you'll come if it's every day every month every week researchers have shown that giving people basic income help solve problems of anxiety uh feeling safer a better relation with the community and at the end of the day fulfilling yourself as part of the economy way more than you could before think the best article i've ever read about it was did you really need the research to know that giving people money will help them

um so that generally speaking about ubi but ubi as we know it today has a tiny problem that we need to talk about the real cost of ubi so what we see here on the left is the safety net of the united states today and how much does it cost we're talking about uh public um housing we're talking about medical care we're talking about every safety net the u.s have created cost about 2.6 trillion if you would like to give a basic income of a thousand dollars a month to every citizen in the u.s it will cost you 2.4 trillion

which leaves you with basically three options of how you can sponsor that one is additional taxes two is just give up on the existing safety net three is print more money all those options talk about redistribution of wealth as a solution to provide basic income we try to think about it a bit differently we are trying to think about it from a perspective of wealth creation and not wealth redistribution we're all part of the ethereum community we all know that if a community is productive it has the ability to create wealth rather than redistribute it from

others people let's talk a bit about how do we imagine that so let's go back a little bit to bitcoin and talk about consensus for example um consensus is the meaning of consensus is social agreement between people the reason today in the bitcoin economy we're all happy to reward the miners with uh daily with bitcoin in a value of tens of millions of dollars over here you can see the child chart of how much miners the bitcoin economy are earning every day at the 21st of july it was they earned 29 million dollars um but we we are all happy to do that because they are the one creating the social agreement the consensus around the

currency that we all love and use that is called bitcoin the question that we asked ourselves was can we create an economy where the social agreement is based on people's usage of the currency where everybody can become the creators of consensus around our currency when we designed that we had three principles in mind of what was important for us when we are designing uh the next currency that's going to be used as ubi one thing the first thing we had we wanted to create a currency that is liquid meaning here is good dollar you don't like it

convert it to anything else you would like now that you have to wait until everybody will accept it as a social agreement so it has any value here's your good dollars convert it to ethereum convert it to cdi to whatever you want i'll explain about how do we do that later on second it was important to us to create a token that is what we call stable enough we are not creating a stable coin we're creating something that is stable enough to be used as a medium of exchange we did not want to create another speculative asset because no one wants to be the next person who will pay 10 000 bitcoins for a pizza third we wanted to create a sustainable

system meaning we want to create an ongoing model that is driven by incentives and not by donations i will go over about how did we fulfill our principles what i'm going to say here is only the upper layer and i invite everybody to come and talk to me after to ask about the questions a bit more in depth so we'll start with good dollar good dollar is what we call a reserve based currency it's a reserve based currency it's you can always come to the reserve and sell your good dollars to the reserve you do it pretty simply you send your good dollars to the

reserve the reserve withdraw the currency that stands within it at the moment it's backed by c die and that's how you sold your good dollars when you want to buy good dollar you deposit c die to the reserve and the reserve will mint more good dollars back to you there is a bar there is a curve that's based on it we will you will the reserve is able to determine the price of the good dollar that you bought that way we managed to give infinite liquidity to our acceptors of ubi the next question would be so that's nice but how does the money get into the reserve first of all there are the people just simply buying from the reserve and

thanks to them we'll manage to supply ubi i'll show you the numbers very soon second system that we have is what we call the trust fund the trust fund is basically a wrapper of other d5 projects so at the moment we are wrapping compound stakers are staking their money into the trust fund the trust fund is taking their money into compound their interest is being donated to the reserve and the reserve means good dollars back as rewards to the stakers basically we're telling you it's take your money instead of getting rewards whatever it is that you staked get your rewards in good dollar um that's generally speaking i know there's

a lot of questions about that and i'll be happy to talk over it uh later on our third part of the system is the claimers the claimers are people who are coming every day to our wallet clicking claim and they're gate getting the pro rata amount of good dollars that were minted that day um everybody has to go through a face verification system to make sure everybody are real people and unique people in our system what's cool about that what i'm showing you here is a mock-up of our launch of v2 that we will we will be launching against september for the first time in a decentralized protocol when you'll stake your money

you could see not only your apy how much money you would make by taking your money but also what we call the social apy how much ubi you will be creating for the world by staking your money to the trust fund this is what is called you know everybody's talking about the double bottom line and we are proud to have a double bottom line a decentralized bottom double bottom line um now i want to talk a little bit about what we have done so far what have we launched and we are still in a proof of concept mode we just finished our proof of concept and v2 would be

when we launch our scalability solution in a sense i want to talk a little bit about what were they asked questions we asked ourselves when launching this protocol and what were the answers that we got uh doing that so the first ask a question we asked ourselves is like does all the money flow i just explained you about walks as we expected it too or it doesn't so we started with 56 000 staked to compound with the model i just explained you about we reached 220 000 people around the world which was even surprising for us and we delivered them a ubi in a value

of 16 000 so that was our proof that okay like the money flow system works pretty well and people were actually using this currency for over 100 000 transactions uh till today with an average of about 1 300 transactions every day now that we stand on second question is has our stabilizing system managed to create a currency and not a speculative asset our market cap as of today is a 166 000 we are proud of being so small and having uh 220 000 people um but our monthly price variation

is of 2.4 a month it's more stable than most of the currencies in the top 100 on coin market cap but better performing than most of the currencies in the developing world which is where we believe good dollar would be in use the third thing we asked ourselves is would people accept good dollar and start using it and would it happen according to our theory of change our theory was that the fact that you have to come back every day and click claim in order to get your money and the fact that you know we're still in small amounts and will be

distributed between so many people will be used as a natural filter for we don't believe jeff vessels will come back every day and click claim to get his money we do believe that countries with high penetration of smartphones and in stable economies will adopt good dollar the map that we're looking at now is every country colored in blue is a country where people are claiming good dollar from on a monthly basis beside south sudan central republic of africa and north korea every country in the

world is claiming good dolo on a monthly basis we have 80 000 people coming back every week to claim their good dollars and i talked to you about the numbers um about how many what was interesting is that it happened like we expected it to initially the countries that adopted good dollar were the smart countries the one who were like excited about ubi and like to talk about ubi and it's really cute for them but they got bored really easily because the money is not worth it second to come were italy spain greece and argentina countries where ubi is an actual need

and something that actually discussed as a movement third came nigeria india vietnam and indonesia in vietnam only um today it's actually way more than that but there were more than 900 000 times people clicked claim to get their good dollars um generally speaking as i explained our protocol is not something that can succeed by itself we are counting on other protocols we are counting on other developers we are counting on the community

to be able to deliver the vision that we seeded this talk is an open invitation to come to talk to us to find a way to collaborate to see how we can unite forces in order to get this thing from a proof of concept to something that is actually helping people on a daily basis um that is it we are hiring if anyone marketeers developers product people will be happy to talk to you and thank you that's it if we have more time can we have questions that thank you that was a great talk um can

you explain a bit more about the method you use for checking that there are no duplicates and no fake submissions and all that the duplicates of the faces yeah so our strategy in mind is solve problems one by one and maybe don't solve all the problems by yourself identity is solved with a centralized solution they called face tech they're giving us a pro bono service um all the faces are hashed no one is saving the data of the people who are going through the phase verification system ai system going over it identify whether you are unique or not pretty simple what is interesting for us is the fact that there are other identity solutions out there that can easily

just connect just plug themselves into our solution than deliver ubi to them so that's about our face verification and and identity solution uh more questions um yeah just wondering like could you talk about like how people who are claiming ubi use it like because the main use case of this is yeah so that was our main question like we were really intrigued by it as well like we're doing a poc where sixteen thousand dollars divided by two hundred and twenty thousand dollars is it's less than a bag of peanuts that we gave what actually

occurred that that was fascinating for us is um they started opening facebook groups and telegram groups all over the world and they started selling digital services that they couldn't sell in the real digital services world in between them so what you see is like i want to call it low-level logos being sold and digital services that usually companies who have money will never will never take but that's usually what we see we see we see the the lower scale of digital services uh being proposed and used as uh as the main thing that people are buying and selling in good dollar today

because for us is good enough as long as it has value as a proof of concept oh and there's a lot of donations that are actually happening we saw that's an interesting one to talk about so um there was a big fundraising happened all by the community to uh subsidize the school fees of some of our ambassadors in nigeria and the community basically just like okay we have extra money we got it as good dollar but just they just send it to the those two guys that ask for it to just subsidize their uh school fees using good dollar it was pretty exciting for us we're talking

about it was a for calls that cost them uh 56 dollars that much but i was managed to be subsidized using good dollar which was for me very exciting i need you to hello hi how did they subsidize it once they send a good dollar um how do you pay the school fees or so i think that's that would subsidize it i'll go back to our slide here sorry our slide here so two things that are subsidized in good dollar first of all the fact that people are buying good dollar and they have putting

money in the reserve the ratio between the money inside the reserve to the total standing value of codola outside is what we call declining so initially for one dollar in the reserve we had one dollar outside but over time we print more good dollars so for one dollar in the reserve you could have 1.2 dollars value of good or outside this extra money that is printed is being delivered as ubi and from our trust fund that is injecting um interest into the reserve on a weekly basis now so that you pay how do you pay the school i mean maybe the school doesn't accept

no he doesn't accept people the the fun part about liquidity okay and that's the exciting thing there's enough to have one person in a community that understands all that and he will say well i will always buy good ol from you in a 10 discount with the local currency and that's what's happening in vietnam in indonesia like we talked to them like how do how do you use it they're like oh this guy is selling like he's willing to buy a good dollar for us for them he's the magic man you give him you give him the good dollar gives you money he's making magic he's doing it for 10 discount that he's taking we don't know him so that's how they manage to pay so it's very it's very organic then you don't have agents and stuff

somebody in the community just volunteer and say hey yeah for you just give me i'll give you the cash fully organic all right cool thank you like we sadly still don't have uh people to send for 285 countries around the world one day we'll see uh yeah great great product great presentation i love what you're trying to do um what do you think are the biggest bottlenecks on growing it even bigger like what what are the levers to pull to make that happen or what have you run into that yeah so okay we need to talk about those bottlenecks like one by one

um first it's about the the magic mans right like you can't create those they have to like i can pay someone to be sitting there and buying and selling good dollar but that's it wouldn't give me what we've got what you need is an organic movement to be doing that and for that you need to create um crypto financial education so for us in our mind the funnel that we want to move users through is that there is a funnel of from a user to a super user imagine how you use facebook groups you join a facebook group you say oh that's nice but i have an idea of how to do it better right and it's because facebook kind of

like educate you about how do you imagine facebook groups you never mind this funnel of giving financial education um to people would be one of our biggest uh jumps and kickstarts uh to do out there so that's one second of all obviously identity solutions are a big problem at the moment as i said we're using face tech if you want to create an immortal product over time that's not a solution that's not a good enough solution it's it's good to prove your concept as fast as possible so the identity solution i believe it's not only a problem that we face i believe it's a problem that

you know our with our industry face in a way the way i look at identity today's identity for itself is useless unless there is a reason why why we wouldn't like to lose your identity um so we hope to become partners or like players in that area as well that and the third we're launching our governance model in september how do you get people to actually participate in that i don't know let's try oh thank you um how are you like funding this whole

operation i understand that like this graph and this part but are you like you know are there like so these things are right but is the initial capital are you just bootstrapping this or is this like bunch of vcs or like you did like some sale or here we go um so our founder is also the founder of ito gotcha okay this is his social impact so when you only imagined doing social impact he didn't imagine it doing it as an any other classic companies he wanted to create a solution to solve the problems and not just give money that will solve problems so we are sponsored by donations

all sponsored by ito at the moment cool and as i said we are 100 for lunch um there's no never was a sale of tokens even ital yoni me anyone else we don't have any pre-meeting of good dollars it's all by the ecosystem that i just explained you okay so thank you everybody and i hope you enjoyed you