Giveth: Past, Present, Future (of Giving) - Willy Ogorzaly

one of my favorite organizations in space billy how are you today best day ever how are you doing shannon yes best day ever i heard that you and the group were having a little bit of a meeting this morning you're hanging out with the gibbot crew earlier you showed up complete with unicorn horn and everything for us that's awesome what are you going to talk to us about today willie i'm here today to talk about uh the past present and future of given and we actually have a new version of divot that we just soft launched so this is going to be the first you know we haven't even tweeted about this so we're leaking some alpha today really excited to share it with you guys first to the east denver community we're so happy to hear about it well i'm going to let you take it away awesome thanks jenny what's up everybody super excited to be here my name is willy and as i said i'm going to tell you guys about the past present and future giving today um so let's dive right into it because we got a lot to cover so the problem that we're trying to solve at give it in a nutshell is the fact that every year over 400 billion dollars just in the united states alone gets donated to nonprofits but how many problems actually get solved and where does all that money even go the question that i want to ask is what if perhaps these nonprofits that we're counting on to solve some of the biggest problems we face don't actually have what it takes and the answer is we're so that's the problem that keeps me up at night that's why i'm so passionate about building a better future of giving with give it so i giveth our mission is to make the process of giving effective and transparent and as i mentioned we're going to show you guys a new version of the giveth platform that we just saw launched this past week but before i dive into that i want to take a step back and share the story of giveth because it's such an interesting story um give it to such a rich history and such deep roots in the ecosystem and uh and yeah i'm gonna try and it's gonna be a condensed version because of course we've only got 15 minutes so i'm going to speed through it and we'll start with uh when given gibbet was born and uh by these amazing founders pictured here um gibbons was started in 2016 rising like a phoenix from the ashes of the dao and in 2017 give it a soft launch and the smart contracts were deployed to mainnet and um some of these smart contracts uh they gave it us responsible for uh are pictured here and have been used since uh in a variety of different projects so a lot of these legos weren't built yet at the time so give it had to build them and giveth was one of the first uh dapps ever so uh as you guys know um there's a lot of building happening in 2016 2017 at the end of 2017 the giveth team was really excited to do the official big launch and of course as you guys know uh cryptokitties happened and gatsby's went absolutely insane it was rough timing and to illustrate this with gas prices of 20 grey you can see how just like simple actions like signing up or donating or creating a campaign cost significant amount of and you can imagine today on main net these these costs would all be an order of magnitude higher so unfortunately it worked but it was just prohibitively expensive to use on mainnet but the giveth team didn't give up there being the optimistic and determined community that we are um giveth started the scaling now effort to help solve scaling now and uh we did a this involved a series of youtube interviews as well as a conference in barcelona with other projects who are experiencing the same scaling challenges and just really looking for a solution and uh the result of this was that uh while everyone agreed that side chains were the ultimate solution none existed yet so to help with that giveth uh partnered with the poa network to launch xdy but at the time there were still uh critical infrastructure missing that blocked give it that from actually porting to extang so the community agreed that the best available option at the time uh was to retreat to the test net specifically ranking and uh shout out to peter chilagi who created a proof of concept relay bridge uh connecting mainnet and wrinkby and uh yeah as a fun fact gimbal was actually the first uh implementation of a bridge used in production so without going too much into the weeds this is the solution that they came up with basically as you can see here uh oops the donations all stay on maintenance um but all the expensive smart contract interactions happen on weekly so you can sign up create a campaign delegate donations and requests to pay out all for free and as an added bonus uh giveth even covers the the gas cost to send the donation uh out to pay it out um you just have to wait a few days of course for a security delay ptsdow so the solution worked really well it's actually still basically uh how beta.giving.io is operating today to enable free donations so um many of the giveth contributors actually ended up transitioning to work on those solutions these scalability challenges um that they had learned from first hand others went on to work on other really cool projects in may 2019 given block science launched common stack which is as yet many of you know common stack is primarily focused on forwarding the discipline of token engineering and is also aligned with gibbous mission of realigning incentives around public goods and yeah basically since since then gibbots has been maintaining and surviving it's been operating in maintenance mode we do have some quite a few awesome projects so we're using and depending on giveth to raise and manage their donations um but we've been more focused on supporting the existing projects and squashing bugs as a and improving the ux as opposed to releasing new features um so yeah shout out to the team and give it the unicorns griff amin danny and kai as well as devs out of libre jorge and andre for keeping giveth alive and running smoothly for these projects that counted on it and yeah i want to give a shout out to the entire original give a team this isn't everybody but i love this picture um really an amazing group of benevolent individuals that built an awesome community and really laid the foundation for us to build the future of giving so thank you all we are standing on your shoulders and yeah that's the super condensed uh part one of this give a story now we're gonna go to part two which is mostly this past year this is where i actually entered the picture i was not part of the original giveaway team but kind of started working with gibbet right about one year ago at youth denver 2020 when my friends ian and dylan and i started did a hackathon project for the impact track called cause and actually by 2020 i'd already been thinking about this problem for seven years um but throughout those seven years i was fully focused on other cool projects so um when i first learned about giveth from danny and lorelei at devcon 2018 i immediately fell in love like the platform they described was exactly what i've been dreaming of all these years and i was so happy that these awesome people were actually building it because i really think that someone needs to build this future of giving um so i just dumped all my ideas on them i was so excited like a little kid at a candy shop i told ideas for uh for what i think the future of giving should look like um which mainly revolved around enabling the crowd to curate uh projects earning interest from donations that are just sitting idly on the platform and enabling people to donate to causes that they care about and trust that the funds will be allocated to the best projects in that cause so i dumped these ideas on them i wish them good luck knowing that the project was in good hands but as we mentioned earlier about half a year later giveth went into hiatus so back to eat denver 2020 um still nobody has built this platform that i've been dreaming of and you know i think it's like one of the most important things for humanity to build so i'm like but no one's built it so uh we had the opportunity to build it at youth denver 2020 at the same time a lot of these legos had come together um and we're ready so things like fiat on-ramps stable coins and the ability to generate interest on these stable coins we're all ready for us to just really easily assemble into a nice mvp over a weekend and present to you guys the community to see what you thought so we did it it was called cause and uh yeah the community really liked it we ended up getting first place in the impact track and got some other bounties um and just a ton of really supportive feedback from the community uh so many of you guys who really appreciated what we had built and gave us um some support to keep building it um i also uh met griff for the first time at uh youth number 2020 and uh he was one of our judges in the first round and he especially was really ecstatic about what we had built um and instantly saw the alignment with with cause and give it submission so um yeah he actually planted the seed that you know we were gonna keep building this maybe we should consider building it with gibbot and with the give us community as the new version of gibbet as opposed to a separate project so i want to pause and just give a huge shout out to griff i am such a big griff green fan he is like one of the coolest hardest working uh most generous most genuine people he had never met and i know a lot of you guys feel the same way because we have done so much forgiveth but he has done so much for so many other important projects in the space so i'm happy the community thank you chris so shortly after denver uh as we all know covet happens so we use the uh the cause hackathon project uh to uh basically give people free yoga crowd source donations and enable the community to allocate those donations to projects fighting copen and it worked well so we got really good validation from that mvp i also want to pause and mention that at this point in time uh danny james marco kai cam had all joined this mission and we're helping to to create this mvp and to create the new version of give it and uh cause was officially absorbed by gibbet around this time so the community started thinking about after this mvp we had built for covid we started aligning around a vision for the next version of give it um and we wanted to keep it really simple so we focused the new version to give it on these three things first we wanted to enable anyone anywhere to start raising donations in minutes second we wanted to build the best experience for donating to causes or projects you care about both with crypto and ideally with fiat as well and of course uh we believe that the future of giving must be free open source and decentralized so of course we have a lot of ideas with where to go from here but we wanted to start with something super simple get it up there get feedback from the community um and evolve from there so why don't we check it out let's pull up um this hopefully you guys can still see this stream um but yeah i'm really excited to show you guys today the new version of giveth as you can see it's really beautiful and simple uh shout out to marco who did all the ui ux for this new version so yeah as you can see there's a couple things you can do here you can either donate or start raising funds for your project so if you donate you can also learn more each of these projects gets a beautiful profile where they can share information about their project and publish updates um you can see also the full history of donations and once you find a project that you want to donate to it's really easy so there's no sign up required to donate um you just need a wallet uh with crypto or soon we'll have the ability to donate with credit and debit card as well we actually pause and say we built a killer stripe integration and unfortunately it was really sad stripe closed down our account after we built it um so i won't go into that but uh we're exploring some other options right now for for fiat donations but with crypto it's really easy there's of course no added fees um you can use all sorts of wallets this is onboard.js which i'm sure a lot of you guys are familiar with powered by block native or i'm going to donate today just with me of course i'll fix this real quick and i'll take a step back so we're going to do the donation in a second right now i'm going to show you guys a sign and i think i got to resign in so um right now i'm signed in with uh taurus so something cool we do here taurus is awesome because it enables people to create a uh wallet just with signing in with email and password or with any of these single sign-in options so i'm gonna sign in with twitter and uh yeah the benefit of this is that you don't really need to know and understand wallets and cryptocurrency in order to publish a project and start accepting donations um but we also recognize that a lot of users that might want to raise funds on giveth already have a wallet so we actually do something pretty cool here we detect if you already have metamask installed if so we give you the option for metamask if we don't detect metamask then we just default you to taurus so let's try this donation again so once you put in the amount you want to donate you can also just send from any wallet um the qr code we're going to confirm this in taurus and then we'll wait for the transaction to confirm on rank fee which can take a second boom i really wanted to make sure we you guys could see the confetti um that was absolutely a requirement for mvp so yeah if you are signed in you can track your history of donations and uh if you are signed in another cool thing you can do is create a project so uh creating project flow we wanted to make this super simple um so we'll run through it real quick you can see how literally in minutes we can put in the name the admin of our project uh we can write a project description and if you need help we've got a great blog post on how to do that you select the categories that your uh project falls under and then you select a location so we're gonna do denver you can also if your project has a global impact you can check that box uh you can upload an image this is probably the most important piece because this is what most people see so make sure you pick a good image or you can select one from the gallery and then uh if you uh you do get a default address so whichever wallet you sign in with which taurus again gives you an ethereum account that will just auto be auto populated here but if you prefer to use something else you can paste in any address here this could be a hardware wallet or a multi-sig and then yeah you can go back you can edit any of these different fields or once you're ready uh you publish it and boom your project is live and as you can see in just a couple minutes we were able to create a project online um and start accepting donations all for free so that is the condensed demo of what you can do now with giveth um i will also show you guys if this is interesting to you and you're interested in joining and helping us out with this we have a really awesome community we're super active in discord and we do uh meetings every week with dev marketing community calls so um and we reward contributions so if this looks like a cool project to you we would love to welcome you into our community and talk about how you can contribute and get rewarded yeah that is the version of the new version of giveth so um right now we're in soft launch mode we're focused on getting some more projects uh uh published and then once we're confident that there's no major bugs we will do a big announcement and uh and invite people to come check out the projects and donate all right um another really exciting announcement from this past year is that giveth has achieved nonprofit status which is a huge milestone and something that we never even knew would be possible so a lot of the credit for this goes out to an organization called the sdg impact fund they are what is called a donor advised fund um which means that they were able without even though giveth does not have a formal legal entity we were able to be uh categorized as a sub fund underneath the fcg impact fund what that means is that we can accept uh tax deductible donations and issue tax receipts um not only in fiat but also in crypto and sdg impactful they're so cool if we receive a fiat donation they will actually convert it to crypto if we ask them to and send the crypto to wherever we need to so they can't recommend them highly enough um if anyone's interested in this happy to make the connection the intro just to just hop into our discord all right and now if we've got time left i want to tell you guys about the future of giving and what comes next so something i'm really excited about something i think is a big problem in the current nonprofit ecosystem is that donating is really hard i have this picture to illustrate like the the paradox of choice and how right now there's a lot of burden on the donor to do research and to figure out which project they actually want to donate to once they've already made the decision they want to donate to a cause and that's bad donating should be super easy um so something i'm really passionate about is enabling people to just donate to the causes they care about and know that their funds will be allocated by the community to the top projects within that cause and then um this by the way i will just say this is a little bit of a dated uh image so a lot of these things have already changed but i thought that just does a decent job of illustrating some of the uh some of the other things that we're excited about in the future so um one of the things that we love to do is when the user donates to a cause we want to issue uh some give tokens we're calling this give backs and this is kind of like our decentralized tax uh deductions so uh tax deductions we're all familiar with um the downside of them is that they rely on governments and they've proven to be a pretty ineffective way of redistributing wealth to the right places so we want to instead of relying on the government to curate which which companies or which uh organizations can receive tax deductible donations we want to decentralize this creation um and so to do this we want to enable people to donate to causes that they care about then as you can see in the bottom right corner uh donations from causes are actually used as matching funds for projects so we're super inspired by git coin and we absolutely plan on using quadratic funding for this the idea is that when people donate to causes those uh donations in the cause become a basically a bucket of matching funds available uh so that if you're donating to a project you can get matching funds from the people who have donated to the cause and then uh while the funds are sitting there between the amount of time that they're donating to a cause and allocated to a project um they're earning interest and we want to use that interest generated to fund the development of the platform so that 100 of every diet donated can still go to projects but uh there's a very healthy uh stream of revenue for the for the community to allocate as they see fit to build this future of giving um so that's i think my time um i wish i had more time because there's so much awesome stuff i'd love to share with you guys but i wanted to make sure we got the important stuff in there and i wanted to make sure we had time to thank these awesome uh projects uh many of which we're using uh or at least it's inspire us um so again thank you guys all so much thank you denver really grateful to have the opportunity today to share to give with vision and yeah thank you again to the entire giveth community for all the hard work you've done over the past year to make this new version happen that was awesome thank you so much willie it's so great to get an update giveth has been such a pivotal organization in the ethereum community for years now the team has been wildly collaborative with other platforms and obviously everybody knows griff so shout out to everybody it's really exciting to see you guys relaunching thanks shannon if there's one thing that you're most excited about in the future of giving in the next say year to two years what would it be i'm really excited about donating to causes i think that that can be transformative and that's something that's not really easy to do with the traditional uh infrastructure without just trusting some central parties to do all the allocation and that's kind of where we are right now so i really think that we have the opportunity to disrupt the nonprofit industry which sounds a little scary at first but honestly it needs to happen it's one of the most inefficient archaic industries that has yet to be even impacted by web 2. um it hasn't been disrupted at least and i think that the reason for that is that um we have the ability now to do that with web3 and to really make the future of giving trustless decentralized open source free all these awesome things that just were not possible before so yeah i'm excited to to continue working on this uh in my free time for sure if you ask people what the biggest concern they have about contributing to four good projects it's that they don't know that the funds are going to be used properly so way more transparency is needed so i hope that we're we're leapfrogging that you're right we're going to skip over web 2 and web 3 is just going to come in and take over um we did have a couple questions do you just want to address really quickly uh what kind of currencies are you guys using for donations so right now um you can donate any uh erc20 token or ethereum um right now donations are on mainnet but we're definitely interested in layer two and how we can use layer two to at least make it really cheap for people who are already on layer 2 to donate to projects that's awesome thank you so much willie we really appreciate you thank you guys oh and i should mention with fiat at least with stripe we had like 135 plus currencies that was one of the awesome things about straight um so we're looking for alternatives for that as well so that people can donate in uh fiat currencies from all around the world have a good one thank you