Giveth: A Crypto Fundraising Platform for Anyone from Anywhere
A crypto native donation platform that pays donors to give
Yes, you read it right. Giveth pays donors and their goal is to make donating profitable.
Web3 is a new world with radically new ways of doing things and Giveth is a product of web3. That means Giveth is rethinking the philanthropy space and designing a brand new crypto powered economy around giving with an aim to create value for all.
Giveth is a crypto fundraising platform built on top of the Ethereum blockchain. They are innovating on a number of fronts.
Donors are rewarded for making donations via GIV tokens thus providing economic incentives to donors for increasing the funding supply
Anyone can fundraise for any cause. Individuals and nonprofit with or without a legal status. Projects get to keep 100% of the funds raised.
They kickstarted their own economy by launching a token (GIV) and fund the development of the platform through their GIV economy. Their market cap as per coinmarketcap is around $2M
Giveth’s ultimate goal is to enable social good projects to have their own micro-economies and become DAOs engaging and rewarding all stakeholders.
I chatted with Giveth’s Communications Lead, Lauren Luz from Costa Rica 🇨🇷 to dig deeper about their donation platform, donor reward program and their vision.
Tell me about your fundraising platform
Giveth is designed to be a platform where anybody can start using it and start raising funds really quickly. To create an account one needs to sign-up with an Ethereum wallet. To make it easy for nonprofits who are new to crypto we have a Torus Wallet integration that lets you sign-in with Google, Facebook or Twitter. This sign-up flow is similar to signing up for anything on the internet. In the backend Torus creates an Ethereum wallet into which all the funds flow.
Once you create and publish the project we have a preliminary review team that checks the project for any abusive, violent or other problematic issues. Project creators can instantly share the direct link to their project and then people can start donating right away. However projects only get listed on our platform after our preliminary review team approves the project.
The Torus wallet integration is awesome for folks who are new to crypto but the Torus wallet has its limitations. If you loose access to your Facebook then people won't know how to log in or if your social media account gets hacked then you risk loosing your money. Our goal is to make it easy to join but along the way we provide information on how to create Metamask wallet and import funds from Torus.
How do people transfer crypto out of their wallet to make real world impact?
The way you want to transfer crypto into Fiat and bring it into your bank account depends on where you're located. Like what your tax status is, which country you're part of and the different exchanges that are there. So like if you're in the United States you could have a Coinbase account and send crypto from your Torus wallet to your Coinbase and then off-ramp it that way and put it into your bank account.
There's a community in Costa Rica where I live and there are a lot of projects on Giveth which are from that community. What I’ve seen is that lot of people is Costa Rica want to buy crypto for cash and so there are these sort of setups for exchanges. We have a working group at Giveth called the Connect Working Group and they're trying to create a country-based list of resources for best off-ramp solutions.
So it’s not necessary to be a nonprofit even individuals can submit projects?
This is one exciting part of Giveth that anybody can create a project and fundraise for any cause be it personal or for community.
We have a second verification process for projects who would like to get “verified” and be listed under the verified projects on our platform.
Verified projects receive more donations since donors who donate to verified projects are rewarded with GIV tokens.
Projects on Giveth need to apply to get verified. On the form we ask a bunch of questions which is to ascertain their credibility and collective impact. We have a verification team that does the due diligence and certifies the projects to be verified.
An important criteria for verified projects is to make a collective impact and not personal since Giveth can also serves as a platform for individuals to fundraise for themselves or their family in case of illnesses or other situations. So to be considered for a ‘verified project’ one needs to be making a broader impact.
So yes anyone can fundraise on Giveth but there’s an advantage to becoming verified because it provides more legitimacy and also the donors are actually getting rewarded.
Can you explain the donor reward system
GIV backs are a critical part of our mission. Donor give to verified projects and they get GIV tokens back and they also become part of GIV stream. The way it works is that when the donor donates they get some GIV tokens that is liquid and goes into their wallet immediately and more tokens stream in over time. GIV token allocation happens in rounds. We track all the donations every two weeks. After the two week period we do a check on the donations, basically making sure people aren't donating to themselves to get GIV tokens and exploiting the system that way. So we review the data and then we send the GIV tokens out some part is claimable and some is given at GIV per week flow rate. Donors gets 75% worth of GIV tokens for their donation so for instance if someone donates $100 they get $75 worth GIV tokens.
What do Donors do with the GIV Token?
One of the thing that GIV token gives them is governance power over Giveth. Giveth is a DAO and GIV is our governance token.
One of the reasons we wanted to give GIV tokens to donors is because we want the people who use our platform to have a say in how things are going with the platform.
We use Garden, a decentralized governance platform which uses conviction voting to allocate funding to different proposals. We also have a forum and if anyone wants to request any funding from Giveth DAO can submit a forum proposal. Once passed at the forum level the proposal then can be listed on Garden and GIV tokens holders can vote to make it happen. So the donors who are now the holders of GIV token can have a say through proposal voting and how the funds should be allocated.
You can also earn more GIV tokens by staking them in the GIV farm and providing liquidity.
How do you as Giveth get funds for your own development work?
Through GIV tokens. We issued our GIV token in December 2021 and with that we launched our GIV economy. We allocated the GIV token to some of our past contributors and our community of stakeholders via an airdrop. We also allocated some to farm for liquidity mining incentives. So the GIV token has liquidity, it has value against other tokens and can be traded.
We created an incentives program where people transfer GIV and HONEY (Token for the Garden governance platform) into a pool and then they stake it to earn more GIV as rewards.
The GIV token has value and liquidity, and the GIV garden (common pool) has 48 million GIV tokens. So if we assume the price is 40 cents then we would have about $14 million available to be spent on our development work.
So do the tokens just move around in circulation or do they ever get exchanged to Fiat for supporting real project expenses and stuff like that?
Both for sure. If you want to convert to Fiat you could go to a Decentralized Exchange like Honeyswap and you could trade GIV for xDai and then you could send that xDai to your Coinbase wallet to exchange for USD. So it’s possible to change GIV to Fiat and it’s also possible for people to be just exchanging and trading it.
Coming back to your Governance do people with more tokens have more influence?
If you have a lot of tokens you do have more influence. But we use conviction voting and conviction voting tries to make that a little smoother by making it so that voting power is a function of number of tokens and the time they're staked for.
So like somebody that has a smaller amount of tokens can put them on a proposal and leave them there. And over time their voting power will grow. This is called conviction voting because the person is signalling that they have conviction for that proposal. They stake their token on the proposal and then the voting power gets larger the longer that they leave them there.
So we use conviction voting for the reason you mentioned, we don’t want people with more votes to have greater say. If you have a lot of tokens you have a powerful stick but also if you have a little less tokens and you leave them there for longer you could gain competitive voting power through conviction.
Do you see more individual projects on Giveth as compared to nonprofits?
We have both. We recently integrated with Giving block API and so Giving Block projects can be listed on our platform through that integration. Giving Block provides crypto fundraising solutions to registered US nonprofits. So we have a bunch of Giving Block nonprofits and then some arrive independently. We have lots of individual projects too.
It must be pretty challenging to verify individuals projects to ascertain their authenticity and credibility? How do you qualify them?
We have parameters like reputation at stake and social media history. We have a verification team that looks into the projects, my co-worker who has been on the verification team for 1.5 years has seen a lot of applications of all types and has evolved the process overtime.
Do you think the economic upside of tokens is what draws the donors into the door? What have you seen, what is the bigger incentive for crypto donors?
A lot of crypto people want to make a difference and our goal is to provide that alignment between the profit seeking and public good supporting behaviour. It's like, how can we bring those two things together? There’s this #Degen2Regen meme. It’s like turning this degenerative, aping in, make a sick yield energy towards projects that are making a difference.
This is something we're really focused on at Giveth on using web3 tech to make donating even profitable. We want to create systems that makes it rewarding for all and that doing good is not always dependent on altruism and sacrifices. To be able to create these economies is really the magic and potential of web3.
Our long term vision at Giveth is to create regenerative micro economies for social good projects on the ground and turn them into DAOs. Giveth is the best example of that regenerative economy vision we have.
Giveth is a DAO. We created and issued the GIV token. We sent it to our shareholders. We created liquidity. We created market demand. We created utility and now people want to have the GIV token. Now the DAO has funding.
Summary
Giveth is a beautifully designed full featured platform. They have made it super easy for non crypto folks to use the platform by having sign-up through social media accounts which everyone is used to. Also if you don’t hold cryptocurrency you can donate to projects via credit card.
Giveth is a future thinking platform. By enabling crypto native organizations (DAOs) to fundraise without having a legal status is a big step forward into the future. They’ve designed the platform keeping the crypto donors in mind, incentivizing giving to increase funding for social good projects. Also since the donors on Giveth do not get the tax deductions as when you donate to a registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit, the GIV tokens act as an incentive to give.
The Giveth “verified” check on projects is becoming a standard in the crypto space for trust and legitimacy. How they screen projects for legitimacy is something that I’d like to learn more.
Giveth is a crypto native platform and the crypto ethos of redistributing power to the users of the platform is what drives Giveth’s incentive programs - rewarding and empowering donors (the users) of the platform.
Griff Green, Founder of Giveth talks about trillion dollar public goods opportunity and how he aims to overhaul the social good space 👇
Giveth’s Donor Give Back Program
If you have any questions or ideas reach out to me on Twitter or leave a comment on my Substack.