# Bringing the Non Crypto World onto Ethereum Through Social Impact

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2018-10-07
- Duration: 23:11
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-1bjLwYOkGPU
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bjLwYOkGPU

## Description

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https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/3/bringing-the-non-crypto-world-onto-ethereum-through-social-impact

Alice is a decentralised social impact network built on Ethereum. It incentivises social organisations to run their projects transparently, so that funders can identify and scale those that are truly effective. We will share our experience (and the challenges) of getting our first application – a hyper transparent donation platform aimed at a mass/non-crypto audience – into production. We’ll also present the work we’re doing with large financial institutions and charities, and the future of the Alice network.

Speaker(s): Raphaël Mazet, Jakub Wojciechowski
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Society and Systems


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Learn more about ethereum: https://ethereum.org/ 

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## Transcript

[Music] hi everyone I'm I'm Rafael I'm the CEO of Alice and this is Jacob who's our huzzah CTO and we're here to talk today about what we've built and how we're helping the non crypto world comment with areum using social impact yeah so really briefly I'm going to give a quick overview of where we are which is that we've we've got a transparent donations platform there's been live since May on Alice dot si which is our website then jacob is going to run you through how we built that the hybrid model that we use to bring mass audiences onto onto the platform and then i'll just give you a brief overview of the next steps for alice beyond beyond donations so if you know alice it's because you know transparent donation platform and the idea there is that you can give to a social project you can see exactly what impact your money makes and if it doesn't make an impact then you get your money back and the project that we have live on the on the on the website right now is a project run by a homelessness charity called st. Mungo's and they are helping fifteen rough sleepers in london find accommodation and deal with mental health issues substance abuse issues and the way that it the the reason why we we built this really is because in the last few years there's been a loss of public trust in the charity sector and the charity sector has really starting to see this as an existential threat because without trust the level of donations tends to tend to fall and so that's why we built is this this donation platform the way that it works is that when you when you go onto the onto the website you can donate your donation gets held in escrow which means it gets frozen basically in a smart contract during that time the charity can start running the project and and started delivering the the goals that it that it set out to achieve so it lays out in in in the pilot st. Mungo's has laid out a certain number of goals and but it's only when the goals are independently validated that the money from the donations gets paid to the charity and in this case it's the Greater London Authority that the the Mayor of London someone in the housing team that reviews the proof so if that's a rental agreement for example if someone's find accommodation then they will they will validate that and at the same time the validation triggers a notification to the donor so they know exactly what their money has paid for to know how the blockchain works what's the blockchain all what is necessary is to have a plane without any plugin so there's no need for complicated tools like a mist browser and as the whole world mostly uses fiat currency we do not want to force our donors to change fiat into crypto get through a crypto wallet and donate we allow for a plain credit card donations which is the most popular way to donate let's see how it works out in the practice so that's one of our first donors actually it's my mom she's she's 67 years old and she's not a crypto geek at all she she stopped casting Kappa the technology in the late eighties when the video tape recorder was released but she know how to use Internet she know how to write an email check the weather and recently she was able to put three transactions on the main interview blog train using our Ally's platform how was it possible so whenever user registers an account on our platform we on the user behalf create a YouTube account which is safeguarded by a password so every interaction every transaction need to be signed by our entering the password we also perform via tokenization so when we accept the money there are stable stable coins issued that are pegged one to one to the original value and the full reserve is keep aside and we're happy to say that earlier this year we took a part in two regulatory sandbox provided by financial conduct authority which is a UK regulatory body and to our knowledge were the first company to use fully regulated digital Pound Sterling provided by trauma lexlabs and from a user perspective the transaction is recorded after he clicks on donate button and then we use and I synchronous relay just to further process the transaction and put it on a blockchain and this solution proven to be quite useful because roughly a month after we launched we noticed some strange behavior in the relay so there was severe delays and a lot of retrials and she was a day 25 June when there was an status ICO so from the point of view of our donors nothing changed at all they were able to submit donations and we process it as synchronously and they were eventually recorded on the blockchain and to be honest were first scared before we started the pilot because we are all about trust and transparency so even if we miss manage a single transaction that would be disaster for the whole idea that's why we are using a triple registration system so we register donation on a virtual wallet provided by a payment provider we register on our classic database and we obviously register it further on the blockchain currently we have a hybrid model but we want to go for fully decentralized and trustless solution but along the way we want to take small steps not to sacrifice the usability and safety for the donors the next step for us was to implement something that we call the geek mode it's a section on our platform when the user can browse and explore all of the transactions that will mate with his interactions and for users who has a plugin that allows to connect to blog train like a web tree connector we got a very simple table but with a restricted read-only access that you allowed to check a balance and what goals were achieved by these users and before we allow our donors to enter the Wild West of the blockchain we want to equip them with safety features like one of that is a donation wallet so all of the transfers outside of the world cannot be can be directed only to authorized verified projects because we want to shield the users against scam attacks so if they receive offer to donate via slack channel or email from an untrusted account they will be unable to process and donation wallet also offers a way to recover if the password was too lost so we can set up a multi seek recover procedure so in a case that you lost a password this you are still able to set up a connection to a new account we also focus on the security of the phones that we are collecting so the other extra features for our Treasury like a two-phase transfers when they need to be initiated by data later on the transfers can be time locked we also introduced a special rollover whistleblowers that may raise an alarm if the transfer looks suspicious but without any acting power because acting powers in the hands of a curator maybe we found the transfer we also use classic features like posing or freezing the treasure reconstruct and escape hatches in an emergency and as the project in practice has evolved engine iterating and if a charity cannot achieve all of the goals it is possible that charity submit a proposal update that is later on voted by donors and beneficiaries and leave that cost is valid the configuration of the project may be change we built an abstract layer around our data so we tokenized that in the form that we store meta information about who was the author of the data at what are the access right and the full evidence is kept in the off train and cryptid database that is synchronized notarized on the blockchain why do we need such a structure for our data I would refer to explain yeah so this has to do with the the broader vision of Alice which actually goes beyond donations and obviously transparency is really important for small donors because they're they're losing trust in in charities but it's actually also important for a whole host of other social impact actors for example big philanthropic trusts and foundations and they are increasingly giving grants based on evidence so it's very important to measure that governments in the UK the US Europe and increasingly other countries shifting also their grants to payment for success models where they only pay when when outcomes social outcomes have been achieved and over the last 10 years or so there's been a real rise in an alternative source of funding in the form of impact investment so what impact investors do is when they invest obviously they they're looking for a financial return but they're also looking for a social or environmental return which means that it's really important for them to track that data and the big problem is that unfortunately when it comes to impact data we're still in prehistoric times everybody is systematically reinventing the wheel everybody is measuring things quite differently the standards that exist aren't really aren't really widespread and really importantly all of that data tends to get stuck in the individual databases of all of these organizations so it makes it really difficult to access and compare and benchmark projects to see which ones are the are the most effective so we are going to build three main evolutions on on the Allis Network the first one is really starting to break down what goes in that impact data so we're going to require that that social organisations break down their projects across five dimensions those five dimensions have been developed by the impact management project with who we we're collaborating it's a big open source research project that's amongst over 700 practitioners all around the world to to build a framework for how to to measure manage impact and effectively the projects will be tagged across those five dimensions and we're also going to require social organizations and projects to produce regular progress reports against internal performance indicators and the way that we're going to enforce that is that they will be rewarded they'll get paid for for submitting those those reports and if they don't submit them on time so for example then they will be punished with all further payments withheld until they do and that payment for reporting is actually also at the core of what of what we do because what we what we're going for is not making impact projects cheap but effective so you're probably familiar with this kind of pie chart that social organizations produce showing exactly how much money goes to admin how much money goes to PR or fundraising how much gets to the frontline and actually we don't think that that's the most important thing at all because it doesn't really tell you anything about how effective they are what we prefer to focus on is tracking the impact so how many people have been helped is this social project actually improving the lives of the of the people that it serves so we're not tracking the money we're tracking the impact the second major evolution to the network is that we are going to incentivize users to take all of that impact data that's been produced by your projects across the network and crunch that data so that you can really surface the most effective projects so that funders can can help scale them and we're also going to build prediction markets that allow users to bet on whether the the proposed changes to projects that are submitted in the in the regular progress reports for example are likely to increase or decrease the impact of of those projects and the idea there is to crowdsource the expertise of people across the network to really help charities learn for from each other and iterate their projects to really make them as effective as possible and finally what we are going to build is another payment module that's focused on impact investment because what we have right now is that donors give to give to the the social projects that those funds are held in escrow and they're only paid out when the goals are validated now the problem there is if especially if you're a smaller charity you might not have the financial resources to run your project before getting the money so that's where the impact investors come in they will provide some working capital some seed capital that they will give to the to the to the project so they can start running them effectively what they'll be doing is underwriting the risk so if the project never produces any results if it never achieves its goals the investors will lose their money but if it does achieve its goals and it gets paid from from the donations in escrow then part of those donations will go to reimburse that investment so that's that's pretty much it that's the that's the broader vision we're building a fully integrated decentralized social impact ecosystem so that social organizations can tap into donations and grants and impact investment so that they're their impact is properly managed and transparent and accessible supported by validation market so they can easily choose validators for their projects whether those are human validators or Oracle's and by knowledge sharing markets that help crunch that data and surface the the most effective projects and that's really what we're all about is really identifying the best projects helping them scale and cutting transaction costs across across the network now we've just published a white paper today just a few hours ago so we invite everybody to go onto our website and read that it covers everything that we've just that we've just explained in in a lot more detail as well as some some some really interesting stuff that we that we're building as well that you'll that you'll be able to read about on the on the like paper like a decentralized fund to help to help smaller organizations really design and and run their projects transparently on the network thank you very much if you have any questions over here please question sorry over here hello this is quite a tedious little question actually um just the matter of issuing receipts to donors I've always found that to be just a real pain in the backside but if it particular if it comes via a bank account so does your module have what what do you do by way of how do you issue receipts to your mother when she's paid her donation so that's that's something that that we actually spent a lot of time on currently the platform can be used only in the in the UK and we went through all the regulatory hoops to make sure that that people could get receipts when they donate they can actually apply Gift Aid if you know how that works in the UK it's a way of gifting the taxes to the to the charities and we had to get the the regulatory the regulatory authorizations to do that it gets applied when the donations come out of the of the escrow because you can't claw it back afterwards and but then obviously as we expand to different countries we'll have to we'll have to figure that out on a case-by-case hi sorry to be a little more critical and harsh on you but how I saw the presentation is more like you're doing charity I see oh instead of actual actually empowering civil society to perform social causes and it looks to me that like you're commercializing civil society actions which I think it's a quite a slippery slope from civil society point of view and I also want to point out that like not far from UK three hours flight from there in Romania there are only six or seven percent of people buying online so you also have to take this into account that other countries are not so used to paying online and this transaction is not going to have that peak of adoption rate and also in terms of terminology when you say the nation it traditionally points to a gift you're giving money to someone or just to an entity and you do not necessarily ask for something in return well in this model you ask for performance so I would suggest turning a little bit this terms around because donations are gifts and this is not what you're doing in this model so just on the on the first bit on the commercialization I didn't quite get where you see the commercialization of charity death when when you when you put a high pressure on different activities performed by a civil society for receiving that type of money right but so it's not so much commercialization as just tracking the the impact so I think all of the your your points absolutely valid I think the reality is that the lack of trust or the decline in trust is very real and unfortunately what happens is that then people get completely obsessed in this really toxic debate around how people spend their money and that's what I was referring to before how much goes to admin how much goes to fundraising and that for me is actually completely counterproductive because it leads it leads to charities trying to be as lean as possible they end up under investing they can't pay high quality people to run projects and so that's why we track the data so and the performance the way that we mitigate what you're saying that's where we bring in the impact investors it's also we're going to implement some models where not all of the money gets paid when the impact is achieved so you could have a model where half of your donations get paid to the charity upfront and then half of the half of the payment gets paid upon achieving the results but really what it is is just an incentive mechanism to make sure that the the the social organizations deliver on on the impact that they that they promised essentially and restore that trust and ultimately what we want to do is just help them raise a lot more money than they are raising at the moment so they can really tackle social and environmental problems at scale and I think on the on the last on the last point or the second point that you made which was a lot of people don't donate online that's true but you know what a lot less people even donating crypto so that's why we're adopting a hybrid model it has to be online for the incentive mechanisms to work and hopefully as as online giving becomes more widespread then they'll be able to spread it out to a lot more to a lot more countries and donors I hope that answers your questions [Applause] [Music]