# Decentralized Outcome Funding for Investigative Reporters by Devansh Mehta | Devcon SEA

- Speakers: [Devansh Mehta](https://streameth.org/speakers/devansh-mehta)
- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-07
- Duration: 22:13
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-BpTDLkSQhVs
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpTDLkSQhVs

## Description

Drawing upon the idea of impact certificates, this talk demonstrates how blockspace can be leveraged to solve double selling of impact (create change once and sell to many funders) and donating on brand rather than outcomes created. The session will go through a demo built by VoiceDeck in collaboration with the EF to help traditional newsrooms port their private database of impact as Hypercerts on Optimism, so they can receive funding based on recorded impact arising from their past stories.

Speaker(s): Devansh Mehta
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Real World Ethereum
Keywords: Effective Altruism, Ethereum for Good, Regenerative Applications, hypercerts

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Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
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## Transcript

[Music] thanks for making it out so early in the morning for this talk um it's really been a very long uh it's been very long in the making I've been uh working on voice deck since 2017 and it's to find a model for journalism that is in the public interest uh which is a very hard question because all of us usually rely on grants so how do we find something more sustainable um so like you know I'm going to try structuring it as a story because that's what's fun and the first rule of Storytelling is uh tell them what you're going to say say it and tell them what you said so this is the part where I tell you what I'm going to say which is um what we are trying to do is decentralizing social impact bonds so this is a model in 2010 it was created around the same time as Bitcoin coincidentally and it's a model where fun ERS only pay for impact already achieved so an investor takes on the risk by investing in a nonprofit and if it delivers outcomes in that case the in the grand person pays out the investor so since it started there have been um kind of now there are over uh 300 impact bonds which have been launched and more than $700 million uh used uh this model is super centralized uh there's like an intermediary there's a minimum setup cost of 20 million dollar that's required for this structure to be worthwhile so I really see a big opportunity for blockchain to decentralize social impact bonds and make it more accessible to retail donors like you and me who don't necessarily want to be a a deep pocket funer and want to just directly buy impact without worrying about is my money being wasted and other questions um so now I'm going to like kind of just say what my journey has been so far um so I've been a reporter for about 8 10 years now it started in college so I started a magazine and the principal banned the magazine we ran an interview very said stupid things and we managed to get that on camera and we posted it and he got upset and banned the magazine and uh I spoke to the media against this he started a committee and that led to my suspension and finally I filed a lawsuit against him and won that so it was like you know really cool to see um kind of tangible impact and really cut my teeth on the on these ideas of speaking truth to power and giving a voice to the voiceless and all of those nice ideas that journalism embodies uh after that I went to the Columbia journalism school so the story on top with occrp they are one of the partners of the Panama papers and I was very lucky to be in the journalism school at the time the Panama papers came out so a lot of my professors were involved in those stories and they managed to get me on as one of the students and I investigated an azerbajan Airlines which had got us Pentagon contracts a loan guarantee from the export import Bank it was about 400 400 million in contracts 420 loan guarantee and um so it was a good story like it broke the it broke it wide open the the the US is in a quid pro cor where they give contracts to the dictator and they are allowed to use aeran airspace for Afghanistan this also led to nice outcomes like it led to calls for Congress to investigate and led to kind of a CEO stepping down for some time he's back now but like at that point he had to uh step down and it was very tangible impact after that I spent about 5 years in a war zone in central India so this is with cget swar um it's a unique model where people give like they give a phone call to a server so it's hooked up to something called a PRI line which allows you to make a call to a server and uh then you have a team of journalists who listen to these stories and um they pass it on to volunteers who call up the officer saying that in this Village the teacher is not coming to school there are no uh the road is not being built and uh then it finally gets sold um because of the volunteers calling from abroad to the government officer and pressuring them so all of these cases are very tangible impact you can feel it it's very quantifiable it's very verifiable but there's still no real way to fund them so I kind of got burnt out sometime around 2021 uh it's been a long journey I started with Learn to Earn which is like a um an idea for paying people to learn information spreading news via Bluetooth in areas without internet uh then during the lockdown a lot of calls came on CG Nets out to help the people who were calling up um and then we started a WhatsApp API where they could now report through WhatsApp and finally uh I was thinking how do I make sure that I never have to write another Grant application and we are still sustainable and we still have money and that's when I came on the idea of an impact certificate and that's what I've been working on uh so far so in in brief this is what impact certificates are currently this is where we are you raise money you create impact and then there's no feedback loop it's all based on your marketing and how many funders you can take to coffee and other things uh in a world where impact certificates become mainstream an an organization would raise money like they do right now they would create some impact with that money and that would result in an impact certificate which anyone can buy to fund their next impact so it creates that feedback loop and the really important problem that this solves is the uh is the trouble selling of impact because on the left hand side the optimum strategy for any organization is create impact once and then try to Market it to as many funders as possible um that's the revenue maximizing strategy whereas with an impact certificate you can only sell that impact once then you have to create impact the other another the time so it rebalances the weight between impact creation and marketing um so this is what our MVP was when we thought about it a citizen might report a community issue they work to solve it and then it publishes an impact report so on the top is already happening um where we come in is we evaluate the report so we quantify it and give it a dollar value like how worthy and impactful was the report and it gets published on chain uh in like we require block chain to make sure that impact is not sold multiple times that it's sold only once and that's why a public database is pretty useful for that um then it becomes available for purchase and it's sold and then it kind of starts this full funding flywheel where there are no more Grant applications required yeah uh this is the minimum lovable product that we ended up building so uh here you see some of the stories that are on our website so one of the stories I'll take the rightmost one is a human trafficker was arrested and put behind bars because a journalist in a rural area went and reported and like kind of kept pressuring them talking to the police and that human trafficker ended up getting arrested um which is a really cool impact and you don't even need to know the organization so that's the other thing the gr world uh discriminates against people who don't know English because you need English to write Grant applications and access that game whereas a lot of these stories are by villagers and like people from remote areas who don't know English but even they can now get funding by just putting their Pro proof of impact on chain and then someone going and buying the certificate um so it's more egalitarian and makes it more accessible to like the people who actually need money to do good work um this is quickly how we quantify impact so in this case of the human trafficker who got arrested and put behind bars we looked at the benefit which is um we looked at this is a fairly controversial analysis but we looked at oecd data which said the size of the human trafficking industry is 32 billion and 2 million women and children are trafficked every year so to quantify this we basically uh saw the human trafficker had trafficked over 100 people before she was arrested and so 100 people and like the value of rescuing one victim is $166,000 so then we can do $166,000 into 100 and then there's something called a counterfactual where you take the probability that the human trafficker would have been arrested even without the journalist being involved so here it was 70% probability we assumed that uh it's because of the journalist that this impact happened so that's something called the counterfactual um so then we managed to get the benefit and then you have the cost the cost of the story is actually how much it cost because some important definitions which I think we lack in the space is uh an output is what you produce so I give you money you produce an output it is in your hands and your control if you don't deliver your outputs you've done something wrong you should not get more grants uh an outcome is is the effect of the output and this is not something in your hands uh so if you can't like you should not punish someone for not delivering on their outcomes because it's not entirely in their hands and impact is outcome relative to cost and this like no one is like thinking about in the space everyone just like yeah I've created impact but are you dividing the impact that you create by the cost that you incurred in creating it because educating one child yeah that's a good outcome you've done very well but if you've educated the child at a million dollar that's a negative impact because the benefit cost ratio doesn't align so output is what you produce outcome is what you uh the effect of your output and impact is outcome relative to cost um so yeah this is the last slide um this uh is how you all can help um so you can like I would really love product feedback uh app. voic de.org that's our um that's a website where you can see different impact certificat kids and where we really hope to make inroads with this uh model is uh through the gift economy so a lot of people uh buy gift cards like Amazon gift cards and other things for friends birthdays and baby showers but this is really funny like I was talking to uh Kevin Oki of gitcoin and he said that his former girlfriend got very angry with him because he gave her a Amazon gift card for her birthday and she's like this shows that you don't know me at all and like you know like you have to get something more personal so I I feel like this is what like this an impact certificate can be that Personal Touch where you can say that look I know that you really value education so there's this story about a teacher who's not come to school and um after it was reported by a journalist the teacher began coming to school so you can actually make it more personal write a message on these gift cards and do and and kind of really crack that market as a way of uh getting impact certificates to have a market um if you're a developer we are open Source MIT license we've already got two folks of our repo so that's kind of been one of this is what success is in the public good space like just having more people to folk your repo and building on top of you and we've got two of those already so we are also talking to different ecosystems for implementing outcome based funding in retroactive uh public goods funding because right now those mainly take the form of popularity contests where I know that this project is good and I know the founders so I'm going to vote for them but and it's very hard for me to say no it's like it's unfair to say it's just the popularity it's if a project gets in touch with me saying please vote for us I find it hard to say no because I like them um but if they instead register whatever outcomes they've created then I can tell them no much easier and and in a less personal way you know that I really like you as a project but I don't think you've delivered as much impact as you can so this round I'm going to skip on supporting your hypers CER or your impact certificate so really moving to to a model where we buy outcomes rather than support projects or vote for projects that's really something that I hope we as a space move towards and like I mean something I heard from filecoin was like they've just uh closed applications for filecoin rpgfan rpgfan so what this means is you're just like funding the same impact again and again so having a model where you list the impact it gets bought up and now you cannot sell it again this is all on chain you can be caught if you uh try creating the same impact certificate again and again um then uh yeah we need like operators we are in the middle of setting up a 501c3 entity trying to get impact certificates to be viewed as tax deductible donations so in Wikipedia like if you buy a mug it counts as cost of goods sold it's not a donation whereas impact certificates are being given to donors so how do we make it a tax deductible donation and not a cost of goods sold those are some of the legal parts that we working out um any partner with a database of recorded impact like these are the people we want to help bring on chain it doesn't even need to be on voice deck like so I'm a next billion fellow with the EF and one of the ways that I explain to developers why blockchain is good is it separates out your back end and your front end so in a regular web2 app your front end is all and your back end is linked whereas in a blockchain daap you anyone can build a front end based on the back end that's there so we are just one of many front ends hypers sear is the protocol that we build upon it was made by protocol labs and uh now there's the hypers search Foundation um and yeah if you want to buy an impact s that'll be awesome we're going to now give you some more uh motivation to uh to buy an impact sort thanks to nidi uh can come up on stage um she's going to sing a nice song which like kind of drives home why impact certificates are good and yeah cheer leaders like literally just follow us I write every day on Twitter at the dean meta so just follow on Twitter and support vote for voice deck and gitcoin rounds whenever they happen and now um quickly we're going to get yeah so this is just a tldr of whatever he just spoke it's a song I'm a web three girl in a web to World taking crypto intern next Bon now let's go you can talk to me about lakes and trees and how to find them using cool Alor rhythms region REI yeah seeking good kind funding regen ref ah yeah Octon sing good coin fing if you want to on board make it simple to use don't depend on just gr use outcome funding tools you can build open source but remember to keep an MIT license so it's truly free you can gift on Vice deck an impact certificate to all your friends I'm a web girl in a web to World taking crypto into next billing now let's go thank you amazing performance nii thank you so much and of course thean you guys already know I'm a big fan since we've guys met in changai um this is going to be an engaging session guys so if you haven't figured out yet that you can ask questions on this session you can scan a QR code there you go or open your uh your Devcon passport and uh go to the bottom part of uh of this session and then you can ask questions and you can vote also if you don't want to ask any question but you like some of the questions and we do have some questions already came in here so maybe we could start off with the first one yes Devon so ask question is why is this important to you yeah it's actually a very personal question as well uh so when I wrote that ocrp story which I showed you about the azerbijan airlines uh I felt kind of demoralized that I had to go back to writing a Grant application for my next story uh I kind of felt like I had proven my stripes as a reporter by uh doing like an investigation over 2 years creating tangible creating tangible outcomes from that story where the US ambassador to aeran Congress is commenting on it so I felt um that something wasn't fair the like the fact that I had to then go back to writing Grant applications um so really creating a model where okay if you've proven your worth as a reporter you get funding similar to trading right I mean trading is an example where you have instant feedback loops if you're like a good Trader you will make money and you have money for your next trade so how do we actually like recreate something like that in media and on a theoretical level uh it's about uh solving market failures so whenever uh I look at like deep problems to solve I think capitalism is great but it has three market failures that need to be solved one is externalities which is this problem that people create more good than they they create more value then they can capture so I like again our space doesn't have definitions but public goods how see it is value creation minus value capture and some people can capture a lot of value so they don't need public goods funding but some of them don't so measure the difference and make it up with public goods funding so that's externalities information asymmetry uh moral hazard and Monopoly so I think those are the four big ways to improve capitalism and that's why it's important uh can buying hypers Sears become profitable so that's something uh which uh we like hope other people take on the the Mandate for secondary sales uh and also like utility like exchanging a hypers cert for getting Dow governance tokens all of that stuff is something we hope the ecosystem takes on our hands are honestly full with quality and like with quality control we are now like Fielding requests from lawyers and even ocrp I just have a call with them tomorrow about taking the Panama papers onchain you know which is really kind of one of our not stars in uh in really breaking journalism out and from the thing of money laundering and all of that we are now literally funding the actors against moneya laundering um and in a dict dictatorship country like Burma so I think this is really important because a lot of journalists have spoke to actually do use crypto some of them the hardcore ones working in these countries and they use crypto to fund their reporters in these areas because if you try giving it through their bank account you're basically going to land them in jail and so you fund using crypto and then they have various ways of off ramping over there um yeah as always overseeing your phone calls and transactions I think that's where some of the work done with uh privacy and the ethereum team and like you know with stealth donations and all of that research is super important in making sure that we can make those transactions um how do journalists determine the cost of their articles that's a great question um right now we are determining it which is based on their annual reports so in the case of video volunteers we saw they had 377 impact reports in a year and we look at their annual budget and then we divide the number of impact reports by with their annual budget so we get the cost of each impact and uh other journalists like ocrp estimate their investigations to be uh $120,000 per investigation Pro public is around $450,000 so that's the range of investigative journalism uh kind of outlets um so really just relying on the media to uh kind of give us the cost per investigation by dividing their budget with the total number of Investigations they've done all right uh I think we have uh one last question yeah so this is a great question and it's something which we will eventually struggle with as well it's called the Cobra effect uh how many of you know the Cobra effect okay no one so basically when the British colonized India they had a problem with all the cobras and so they gave a bounty for cobras saying if you bring us cobras we'll pay you money and what ended up happening was Cobra Farms where like people were farming cobras and they would then uh kind of give money and and the British realized this H this was happening so they stopped the Bounty program and all the Farms released the cobras into the wild so we had like way more cobras because of that so that's the issue with like waste collection from beaches all of that and that requires interface with the real world um to verify that they're not gaming it whereas investigative reporting is online you can verify if your court if your article was cited in a court case online and journalists have this cultural norm of reporting the facts so I think that's the other important aspect of Journalism um oh right this is really great uh questions I must say so in terms of who we give the money to it's the Whoever has the F line that's a very important Concept in journalism b y l i n e the by line and the by line is who Whoever has reported the story and has it under their name because you like this culture of anonymity doesn't really exist in journalism except in rare cases you want a person who's standing behind the story and is willing to attest to the facts so the person who does that is who gets the money in terms of who gets funded we use a method called outcome harvesting where you don't look for a attribution like this journalist created the impact you look for contribution so you would say this journalist was % responsible the lawyer who filed a case was 20% responsible and you assign weightages to each one so that's a so that's mostly how we go about this thank you so much devant let's give him a round of applause please and