You could just invest in 3m Treasury bills directly, or invest in a conventional fund that buys bills, (or indeed whatever other investments you thought were most appropriate given your circumstances) and then donate the interest to charity.
Yes… if you have $3m lying around which you don’t need at the moment.
If you buy $3m GLO, you generate the same amount of interest for charity. But you also receive $3m worth of GLO which you can then go and use in the world as money.
As long as the money stays in the form of GLO, it keeps on generating funds for GiveDirectly because we keep on earning yield with the underlying USD.
With your idea, only money that’s not currently needed can be put to charitable use. With GLO, money that’s being actively used (e.g. what’s on checking accounts) can be used as well.
Put in a different way. Imagine every dollar bill had an imaginary button that you could press to toggle on and off. Turned on, the dollar bill donates $0.02/year to GiveDirectly. Other than that, nothing changes, you can still use the dollar bill as normal. That’s the idea.
This of course is contingent on us working to make GLO an accepted currency, or to at least have payment rails (e.g. credit cards, Stripe, PayPal) support it. That’s indeed what we’ll do. Not unrealistic, as said payment rails already support cryptocurrencies (most notably USDC, a stablecoin we’ll directly compete with and has pretty much the same properties as GLO).
But even before we make it an accepted means of payment, GLO can already start competing with today’s $150b stablecoin market. For a sense of scale, if we capture 7% of that, assuming 2% yield, we’d generate $215m annually. That’s roughly the amount of cash distributed by GiveDirectly over 2020.
You could just invest in 3m Treasury bills directly, or invest in a conventional fund that buys bills, (or indeed whatever other investments you thought were most appropriate given your circumstances) and then donate the interest to charity.
Yes… if you have $3m lying around which you don’t need at the moment.
If you buy $3m GLO, you generate the same amount of interest for charity. But you also receive $3m worth of GLO which you can then go and use in the world as money.
As long as the money stays in the form of GLO, it keeps on generating funds for GiveDirectly because we keep on earning yield with the underlying USD.
With your idea, only money that’s not currently needed can be put to charitable use. With GLO, money that’s being actively used (e.g. what’s on checking accounts) can be used as well.
Put in a different way. Imagine every dollar bill had an imaginary button that you could press to toggle on and off. Turned on, the dollar bill donates $0.02/year to GiveDirectly. Other than that, nothing changes, you can still use the dollar bill as normal. That’s the idea.
This of course is contingent on us working to make GLO an accepted currency, or to at least have payment rails (e.g. credit cards, Stripe, PayPal) support it. That’s indeed what we’ll do. Not unrealistic, as said payment rails already support cryptocurrencies (most notably USDC, a stablecoin we’ll directly compete with and has pretty much the same properties as GLO).
But even before we make it an accepted means of payment, GLO can already start competing with today’s $150b stablecoin market. For a sense of scale, if we capture 7% of that, assuming 2% yield, we’d generate $215m annually. That’s roughly the amount of cash distributed by GiveDirectly over 2020.
Edit: this comment was in the wrong place, sry—now it’s here