Co-founder of Glo, a stablecoin that reduces extreme poverty by passively generating money and donating that to GiveDirectly.
Jasper Driessens
Karma: 94
Global Income Coin: a UBI-generating currency
Another example of this is Humanitix [website / wikipedia], a ticketing service like EventBrite.
I’ve been thinking about the Guided Consumption model as Choice Charity. Do good simply by choosing a different provider—no donations required.
With Global Income Coin we are following this model as well, except with a currency rather than a product or service.
This is essentially a longterminist motivational video ❤️
Haven’t felt this longterminist since reading chapter 2 of The Precipice.
I personally don’t feel qualified to represent EA in a talk, but you and the FTT DAO members might be interested in a UBI-generating currency: Global Income Coin, a project that’s both web3 and EA concepts.
Thanks! The goal is to have a situation where liquidating (i.e. redeeming) is as fast as making a crypto transaction, and can be done at any time with any amount.
It might be the case that in the beginning it’s a little less efficient than this. We’ll prioritise getting the token out in the world first and then move towards that level of service.
Of course, eventually we’ll work towards the situation where you won’t need to liquidate your GLO to use it as money, either because
Your GLO balance is linked to a card that automatically converts to USD when you pay
Merchants accept your GLO directly
But you’re right. In the meantime, for a supporter to maximally advance Global Income Coin, they’d keep an as large amount as practically possible in GLO, try to make their purchases in GLO as much as possible (because this is what incentivises merchants to accept GLO), and keep a USD balance for making purchases that can’t be made with GLO yet.
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.
Thanks, appreciate it!
I agree, replacing all M0 is ‘optimistic’. Plus, even in the most successful outcome it’s not at all sure that that’s what happens—it could very well be GLO replaces a part of commercial bank created money (i.e. M2 but not M0) instead. The reason we use the number is to have some figure illustrative of the size of the potential. By basing it on M0, this max potential figure is not totally arbitrary, and it also allows for a simple back-of-the-envelope estimate since it assumes a world in which credit-based money creation by commercial banks would simply continue as normal.
Most important is that any level of adoption—as long as its self-sustained—leads to some amount of seigniorage that can be used for UBI.
Which part of verification seems cumbersome? Our goal is to delegate this to crypto exchanges, who already KYC their clients. The user experience of verifying for Global Income Coin will be similar to opening an account at an exchange, broker, or neobank (take a selfie, scan passport etc)