Charitable Giving for Everyone - Maria Mihu

hello everybody my name is maria mihu i'm a back end developer and charity outreach coordinator at fair and i am going to teach you guys over the next 15 minutes about what fair is doing and how we kind of hope to change the world cool so um i'll skip to the agenda so essentially who fair is is we're trying to bridge the gap between charities and the world of digital art so we're trying to maintain this delicate balance of making sure that everybody who uses our site everybody that we're targeting feels like they're represented in this space so today i'm going to go through how we're supporting charities how we're supporting artists how we're supporting the environment and then most importantly how we support everybody and how we make it possible for everybody to be a part of this so like i said sorry all right so like i said fair aims to bring charity art to the digital world so we are are the first and only charity focused nft platform on the near blockchain part of the near ecosystem so what does this mean we allow charities to have a platform that's dedicated to their cause and that allows them to collect donations from supporters and provide them with collectibles so basically we're an nft platform that puts charities first we put charities on the forefront they all have their own dedicated marketplace that people can come and check out where they can share their story they can share their mission and you can you can go and see what kind of causes you want to support and what what those charities are doing so how does this work we've set things up so that we allow the charities to benefit not only from the original sale of the nft but also we've baked into our smart contracts an ongoing commission that allows the charity to make a profit off of these nfts going every single time it changes hands afterwards every single time it's resold on the secondary market there is money going into a charity's hand and that money is going to help people we also want to support artists like i said so we're allowing artists as well as charities themselves to submit art mint it as an nft and connect it to a cause that they support and that they're passionate about so artists can choose to maintain a commission for themselves they can choose to have all the funds go to charity um it's we we have a lot of flexibility and we're really excited to show what that looks like so we've had to maintain a balance between what you know how how we bring artists to our site how we want them to feel supported and then also how we allow charities to make you know um revenue from from their sales so we've set up a financial model where an artist can select a royalty for themselves between zero and 45 percent and then the charity will receive the rest of that pool of money so on the first sale you meant this beautiful artwork and the charity will receive however between 45 to 90 which is a very significant sum of money some of our competitors do have you know models where there's money going to charities but they're often a lot smaller percentages um especially on the secondary market so we want to make it so that you know we're benefiting charities as much as we possibly can so like i said on the secondary market we have a smaller pool that is dedicated to the royalties because we want to make sure that the owners are still able to you know flip these nfts and make a profit but we're hoping that this profit that the owners are making also allows charities and artists to continue benefiting um we're small right now we're growing we haven't launched yet so those market fees that you see there we do plan on decreasing them but for now we're starting off with about 10 going to fair on the primary sale and 3 going to fare on the secondary markets so what makes us unique and what makes a lot of charities really want to work with us and really want to get involved is most charities don't know anything about nfts they don't know the first thing about you know the blockchain space but there are other people who are already getting into it there's charities who have already started initiatives and partnerships so we want to be as flexible as possible and make everybody feel welcome so we have kind of four levels of service that we're offering everybody gets a chair a charity marketplace and access to receipt and sales tracking monthly reporting social media and spotlight coverage on our website but then there's other pieces to it that make it easier for some charities who are a little bit newer to the blockchain space to feel like they don't have as much that they're having to control so we have options where our team handles the artwork and minting on the site we have options where our team handles the wallet and all of the financials and the funds that are going into the near wallet and then we have options where we handle everything and we make it super easy for charities to just say all right i want to make money from cryptocurrency donations and i don't really want to be involved and we say that's not a problem we'll handle everything for you so kind of moving on to how we support the artists we've partnered already with a few organizations and we've we've in talking to them we've realized that there's a need to really amplify some underrepresented artists underrepresented voices and so we aim to allow artists to support causes that that they might be passionate about and especially causes that you know they may benefit from directly themselves one of our partners hope for haiti aims to work with us in the future to make a really easy onboarding process for haitian artists to actually mint artwork on our site directly and this is something we're super excited about if anybody you know knows of somebody who is an artist and they might be passionate about a cause or might be you know interested in in giving back to an organization that helped us or helped them we're the perfect platform to come so we're also proud to be partnering with nir we are built on the near blockchain and near is a proof-of-stake blockchain that is completely carbon neutral and is committed to carbon neutrality and this is really important for us because we have a lot of charities who are environmentally focused who are conscious about their impact on society and on the environment and we allow them to have you know this peace of mind that we're working with a blockchain that actually also actively contributes to maintaining carbon neutrality and to giving back to the environment and this is super important to us and we're really happy for all of the support that nier has given us since you know our inception so overall like i said we want to be the marketplace for charities we want to be the nft marketplace we want to be the first place that people think of when they wish to give back to the community and we want this to be as easy as possible both for you know crypto gurus nft collectors experts in the space but also crypto newbies my mother was able to use our site and she doesn't know the first thing about you know nft's or the blockchain space and she thought it was warm and inviting and that's what we want we want your grandmother to come to the site you know around christmas when she's feeling like giving back we want um you know we want this kind of supportive community where anybody is able to use our site and anybody is able to um join and and give back we've been working specifically with with one of our charities they were they're the first canadian charity to be involved in in something like this in an nft partnership like this and we've onboarded them from the ground up and they are now fully functional with a near wallet and able to navigate the blockchain space and we're confident that they're going to keep growing and expanding in that space as well thanks to our help so we have some exciting partnerships already we've partnered with three organizations and we're also super happy to say that we have a very diverse range of organizations we have the last door which deals with poverty and addiction and homelessness hope for haiti which is directly benefiting the earthquake response fund in haiti and the wild tomorrow fund which aims to restore natural habitats in africa so we want to see a platform where we have as many causes as possible that we support so that you know no group is left out and no group is not benefiting from the nft charity space we also do have an exciting bigger national partner that we are still in the works of of ironing out the agreement with but we hope to to only expand from here and get as many people on board the charitable giving space as possible so that is pretty much all there is to say we hope to be launching within the next few months we are going to be um keeping our socials up to date with our with our road map and our plan for launch and we hope that this little teaser has excited you and has made you start thinking about where you're putting your cryptocurrency and giving back to the community i'm also open to any questions if anybody has any questions or anything they want me to clarify we have one of our founders here in the audience ben couric he can also answer some of your questions so yeah thank you so much for listening what are some examples of um nft either utility or like rewards or things that uh that you've seen or that you're thinking about to make the the value continue for the nft and the desirability for secondary markets we definitely think there's there's a place to go with like generative nfts and things that people can can contribute to directly in terms of monitoring their own impact their own let's say carbon footprint or their own involvement in giving back let's say to homeless people so we think that's an interesting area that could could definitely be explored we think that um in the future we hope to actually we actually do hope to have like a special projects kind of part of our website that that directly handles those kind of initiatives so we're on the same wavelength here um hey uh great idea i've been selling services to nonprofits for like 20 years they have a very complex decision-making process and all this what is their contribution to this are they primarily saying we'll be the beneficiary and that's all they do are they taking in the legwork behind it and promoting it what's that typically look like would you be able to repeat just the last bit of your question it was a bit muffled yeah what's the contribution from the nonprofit to secure the relationship are they simply saying we'll be the beneficiary and doing nothing or are they actually promoting it helping build it connecting the artist like what's the non-profit doing to be a part of this equation yeah that's a really good question we try to keep it as flexible as possible because we find that based on the size and the scale of the charity they have different needs so for example um one of the smaller charities that i mentioned last door they're very much they very much want to be involved with everything they want to help us promote they want to help promote themselves they want to have a partnership where we promote each other and we bring awareness to each other's causes and then they also directly look for artists that they think would speak to their cause and they're totally involved 100 percent hands-on we have other charities who they kind of just want to see money coming into their bank account and that's okay because at the end of the day our goal is to also have a community built out of this right a community of artists as well as charities so we're always going to have we have the bandwidth on our side that if a charity doesn't want to be as involved then all they really need to do is just formally acknowledge our partnership and that's pretty much about it so we keep we purposely keep it flexible because there's such a wide uh variety of needs in the in that kind of space it hey there um can you say a little bit about your origin story like was this an artist's idea was this a charities idea was it sort of like a tech personality where there's a lot of people at the table like how'd the idea come about i would love to pass this question to our one of our co-founders ben if he doesn't mind taking the mic i think it should come from our founder's mouth hello hey um yeah so the idea really came from the boom that happened in the past couple years in the nfd space and how much money was generated in that whole in that whole space and so um myself and a professor at the university of waterloo we came up with the idea of um you know bridging this gap and and allowing charities into this huge potential space um just basically based off of numbers we saw how much money was coming in and we thought that it would be a fantastic idea to bring some of that into the hands of charities um yeah does that answer your question cool so if nobody has any other questions right now i'll be hanging around afterwards i'd love to chat more especially if you have any any ideas i'm super open to even if they're ideas for the future but where fair can go i'm super open to them so thank you so much everybody