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.