Overview
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A charitable endowment that anyone can donate to, the principal ETH is invested forever, and anyone can vote on where to donate the returns.
Alpha
Form initial community of contributors
Set up multi-sig
Establish pilot funding partnership
Raise first 32 ETH
Vote on where to invest principal ETH (e.g. run validator node)
Vote on where to donate first returns
Beta
Consider adding ability to withdraw principal
Consider spinning out from Blank as a standalone project
Benefit humanity
Democratic decision-making (1 vote per human)
Some capital for operations and team incentives
Design endowment to last forever
Positive community
50k ETH locked (~$100M USD as of May 2021)
5k ETH allocated (~$10M USD as of May 2021)
1M+ voters (1 vote per human)
500 ETH locked (~$1M USD as of May 2021)
50 ETH allocated (~$100k USD as of May 2021)
10k voters
The Ethdowment is hacked and/or manipulated and money and trust is lost. The project negatively impacts users and detracts from the movement around philanthropy DAOs.
Project fails to achieve goals, but:
Makes a net positive contribution to to the movement around philanthropy DAOs
Ethdowment assets are used productively to help the world.
Possible safe landings in this category of outcomes include:
The community takes forward the Ethdowment as planned, but it remains small.
Possibly explore returning and/or withdrawing some principal
Ethdowment becomes the internet's default charity.
It's the largest and longest-lasting philanthropic endowment in the world and it demonstrates that democratic philanthropy results in more good than purely donor-driven philanthropy.
Ethdowment is cited as playing a role in the transition to new forms of global, digital cooperation that complement large legacy social institutions.
Relatively little money is donated globally (e.g. in US giving is <2% GDP).
Giving is unreliable, sporadic, and often dries up in times of need.
Nonprofits operate in "starvation mode" (short-term thinking) due to unreliable funding.
Donors allocate funds but rarely understand the problems they hope to solve.
The global poor have little power when it comes to influencing philanthropy.
Nonprofits that appeal to donors raise more money than those that focus on helping beneficiaries, so nonprofits spend a lot of time fundraising at the expense of doing work.
Governments and other legacy democratic institutions are decaying and inefficient.
It's difficult to change large, legacy systems from within due to their size and incentives.
There aren't enough real-world experiments to find better alternatives.
There are very few global, democratic organizations for addressing global problems.
Most large global institutions are accountable to governments, not directly to the people.
Legacy legal and financial frameworks make truly global organizations difficult to run.
Crypto natives have the capacity to donate more as a community than they currently do.
Traditional philanthropy is resistant and slow to meaningfully embrace crypto.
A crypto-native charity will successfully raise capital because there’s money in the space but not many charities that successfully utilize web3 to do more good.
Crypto will be the top-performing asset class in the foreseeable future and locking donations in a crypto endowment will result in more sustainable philanthropic funding.
Democratically deciding how to allocate Ethdowment returns (one vote per human) will result in more good than if donors were solely responsible for deciding where to give.
Allowing contributors to withdraw capital will ultimately result in more returns than if they couldn't withdraw
Start as small as possible and evolve iteratively
Do less in order to prioritize quality and trust (audits, thoughtful governance, etc.)
Have clear milestones that incrementally validate hypotheses at each stage
Always maintain a soft landing plan to mitigate risk of losing or mismanaging capital
Create a system that can create a better system (don’t try to design a perfect system)
Implement progressive decentralization and work toward reducing reliance on team
One vote per human
It'll be difficult to figure out an effective and efficient way to enable one vote per human. The cost of a sybil attack is high, given that an attacker could potentially create multiple accounts and manipulate governance to steal funds. Most existing identity-as-a-service / KYC solutions rely on government IDs, which exclude some people, are expensive to verify, and introduce a central point of failure.
Raising enough money
It'll be hard to raise enough money for the Ethdowment to have meaningful impact. Our hope is that if voters are able to directly benefit from the Ethdowment's returns (e.g. a project they like is soliciting Ethdowment support, there's a universal basic income distributed to voters, etc.) then they will be incentivized to convince more people to donate, kickstarting a virtuous cycle: donations --> more voters and advocacy --> more donations. Other than that, we don't have a good solution to fundraising, beyond hoping donors believe in the idea and want to donate.
We don't want to spend too much time or money fundraising. If after putting in sufficient effort, people aren't interested in donating, we'll wind down the project.
Funding overhead
It will be difficult to fund the Ethdowment's overhead. We expect a lot of early work can be done by volunteers. However, it's unrealistic to expect that an entirely volunteer team is the most effective way to manage a large endowment. Regardless of how much of the Ethdowment is managed by smart contracts and governance, things always change and there will need to be some humans need to manage changes. Unlike for-profit protocols, there won't be a token that contributors can hold to financially incentivize them to contribute, so at some point people should be paid.
We think eventually allocating some percent of the Ethdowment's returns to funding overhead is a smart move, however, we'll leave this up to community vote. If we reach the scale where this is necessary, it'll be a good problem to have :)
We plan to implement a process of progressive decentralization in five stages:
Core team makes decisions (ad-hoc)
Remove multi-sig
Note: After the third stage, the Ethdowment should be "sustainable" in the sense that the entire core team could disappear and it'd continue to operate.
There's a lack of crypto-native charities that are aligned with the values of .
Our hope is that emerging decentralized identity solutions like and can help solve this challenge in a trustless and efficient way.
Core team + advisors make decisions via a
Airdrop governance token and allow contributors to vote ()
Add one vote per human (e.g. , possibly with a UBI incentive)