Turning ETH Staking into Education, Connectivity, Trees, and Cash Aid - Buenos Aires 2025

So good morning or good afternoon everybody. Um it's a pleasure to be here in Argentina. Um and today I'm going to talk about impact staking which is something launch nodes have been doing since we founded as a node operator business and D app business. And there are a lot of different ways to play this and could show you the app and deploy mechanisms and deploy capital. But actually what we wanted to focus on is the narrative.

Uh and the narrative I suppose starts with where did the idea come from and and what are the formulations behind it? Where are we now? What have we built? What can you use and connect to your projects? uh in terms of in terms of funding the start really um of this journey was the best thing about me which is my wife and the fact that through her work I got to be in central Asia in Eastern Europe in West Africa, South America and now in East Africa where I live and what I saw there were schools that needed internet connectivity and much more you know health clinics that needed power and nos's um that were working very hard and having to balance donor obligations with real world work that changed people's lives and that balance being hard to manage.

And as someone who was a simple IT dude, not someone uh as as passionate and motivated as some of the people I saw around me, um and possibly with low emotional intelligence, I saw a really clear systems problem, which is that once the funding stops, the work stops and there was no lack of dedication from the people. Um, the intent was always good. The ideas were iterations that needed more iterations. Um, but it felt like this donor construct driving the work was broken. And so I began to wonder quite simply, could donors keep their capital and could the work continue?

And that's really where impact staking is. It's this idea that you're using a staking return or a DeFi yield and you're connecting that money pipe to fund social impact. And again, it's worth considering the assumptions. And our assumptions are this that Ethereum is a general purpose technology and as that network grows, it will change everything and become the new fabric of the financial economy in the same way that the internet sort of changed everything. And staking sits as a financial primitive in that and connecting that to these intractable problems that we have in the world that need a long tor long-term source of funding but also need an agility to change driven by impact data is is what we saw and what we've we've tried to build something for.

um and impact staking tries to replace that one-way one-way street um by saying and we've we the slide here talks about lido impact staking which is what we've built but we've also work and continue to work in a solo staking capacity to those institutions or or donors that have 32 ETH and want to point um some or all of their returns to to fund these causes. But within the Lido staking impact context the mechanism is super simple and there are two types of customer we have within within the lido context lo impact staking context. We have the organizations like UNICEF, like give directly, like UNHCR, like Mercy Court Venture Fund whose work is being funded by staking returns. And then on the other side, we have the donor now the impact staker who is not going to give away their capital. They're going to keep all their money and keep custody of it, but they're going to stake it and donate some of the yield, not all of it.

It doesn't need to be 100%. It could be 1% up to 100% to these organizations. And the user interface being simple and easy is really important. The the dashboards that allow you to see a portfolio of your impact as a impact staker or donor uh is important. And then your ability to receive those donations directly with no intermediary and understand who's sending them and what's coming is also part of the mix.

And the idea is that it it your funding is a is an agile stream driven by your impact data. And when we look at the the net effect of this or or the or the story of this, we think that there might be a sense of loss in this idea of traditional charitable giving. You give once, you hope it's used well. No doubt the people receiving the money have the best of intentions. But when the money runs out, it's very difficult to sustain that work.

Impact staking tries to replace the line with a loop and create a feedback system. The yield keeps coming. The impact data drives and supports that commitment. And then the impact keeps building and the donor keeps their money. They don't give it away.

And because it runs on chain, the ability for every transfer to be logged and understood and hopefully over time for all the impact data to come on chain becomes compelling. And it isn't by uh trust or uh values that are uh marketed. It's trust by design, we hope. And one of the things that I think uh is so important about the organizations and the work that they're doing is they sit in datarich contexts right UNICEF Giga have done an incredible job of mapping all the schools in the world and trying to connect them to the internet the ping times the circuits the locations of the school. This data is available for those people who want to support giga um using this mechanism.

Give directly's model of giving poor people cash and allowing them to determine how they use that cash is supported by incredible um research data uh and RCTs that are that are measuring the impact. And that impact data I think is a field that we hope many of you can help us improve and grow. But it's it's a critical part of this of this loop. The psychological shift that impact staking creates is also quite interesting because the idea of letting go in philanthropy um and that's the end of it is what we hope we've changed. And with impact staking you're only giving up the opportunity cost of your yield.

the capital remains yours and that makes a relationship easier to manage from a organization receiving the funds and managing the expectations of the donor and it also supports the donor being more giving and being able to support something for the longer term and I think that we're not alone in thinking this and I think um other panelists mentioned Octton uh and we see lots of ideas in this space um but the critical bit of this funding paradigm is that it can be long-term without uh an ever greater request of of of of generosity from the donor and we work and support using uh impact stake in grassroots economics and will rudd the founder there is is a is a big uh hero of mine and he talks about the idea that we do not need to reinvent generosity we need to give it rails and I think that's really true people are talking right now all the time about innovative funding and the Norwegian government um and the EU and other big donors talk about it. The hope for us in terms of impact staking as a tool is that it will naturally create a more flexible datadriven uh mechanism rather than having to support massive project plans that fundamentally change because the work being done to make things better is complex and has multiple variables. So that's impact staking. and using ETH. And we have now essentially applied the same idea to stable coins and integrated with Ave to create again a very simple user interface that says a donor can put down a million dollars and then after 3 five years of donating x percentage of that to whichever cause they want to support they take that money back.

Now in in impact staking you get back your 1 ETH your.5 ETH your 10,000 ETH but the value of that ETH may have changed and so we talk to people who are not in crypto and try to bring them into crypto to drive real world impact food connectivity trees the idea that you remove that volatility risk basically from feedback from our customers we've felt that that's very important and therefore using stable coins and being able to say you get exactly a million dollars back or $1,000 back or $100,000 back provides a lot of utility to these customers. And so we're we're working with that and much like um much like uh our work in impact staking the data data rich context is is is super powerful. We're working with UNICEF Giga to launch this. Um, and it's a small amount of money to start with, $25,000, but we're working with our first institutional donor, which is uh the GSR Foundation, who I'm going to talk a little bit about as well.

Um, and this the yield varies obviously because you're using a um but it helps connect schools to the internet. Um and we're excited about um scaling that up and we hope that it starts nudging a really practical example of using these core massive mechanisms of lido and ave to be an an act of service rather than exclusively uh a tool for financial speculation or or just profit earning yield which is there's nothing wrong with that. I think we have been lucky with our customers both in terms of Mercy Court Ventures, UNHCR, UNICEF, but we're also really lucky with the institutions have backed us in terms of being this new impact staker instead of a donor. And throughout the course of this week, I'm sure you'll hear lots of people whispering institutions, institutions. And for impact staking, institutional adoption is important not because of the money but because of the standards that it brings.

And so the GSR foundation who I very happily will um introduce anyone who wants to make a connect to them are fantastic. And part of the reason why they're fantastic for impact staking is is that as a partner they are not just bringing money but they are bringing standards. And the standards are that an organization that even is cryptonative has risk, it has legal, it has compliance, it has many, many stakeholders that need to be bought in to try a new modality like impact staking. And they've said, "We've done it. We're going to create an open source playbook, but more importantly, any institution or family office that's looking to do it, come talk to us.

We'll walk you through what we did." So, we're really grateful for that. and and the standards around this I think will build and as we hope other organizations who aren't massive uh look to use this mechanism they can borrow some of this to talk to their database to get funding impact table um impact staking is permissionless so any organization can sign up and start uh using it and and get working and the idea is that you're now in a world whereby you know funding doesn't depend on the next gala dinner um or the next campaign or managing your donor's moods, but it but it flows alongside your impact data and a mindset to learn and improve with your donor's risk mitigated because they've not given you their money. When we think about the schools we've connected and the lessons we've learned in in doing this, connecting schools is exciting and seeing the change that brings. I've been lucky enough to see it.

But wouldn't it be great if we could pay for those schools power um pay for student fees and they're all covered by people's commitments through staking returns and DeFi yields not once but continuously. And we don't think this is utopian. Um and we also don't think that optimism is a calculation. We think it's a choice. And I know many of you are optimistic, many of you may be cynics, but um the work you do is important and we hope that this is a mechanism can support you making the choice of optimism.

It's working software and it exists right now and we we really would love um as many of you possible to get involved and start using it. So I think we've talked about the mechanism a little bit. Um, we've talked about the idea of the component that these two customers, the donor as the impact staker and then the organization receiving the money. Um, I think what we really need your feedback on is is is how we build this. We see this as akin to micro finance.

Like this is the first flavor, but there will be many flavors. And I hope many of you might build some of those flavors in this room. whatever we've done is available to all of you to build on top of or left or right of and um the use cases that we're working with um we think are important but we know that there are many out there that you're working on that we hope we can connect and and fund a finan a financial mechanism with a feedback loop that funds itself is is the goal um we are still learning and um we invite you to learn with us one thing we think is really important about new models and sustainable finance is working with the money we have and making it not work harder but use better logic to try and balance these two different customer demands. the projects that need money to do their work, donors who have a limited supply of capital. And the idea that Ethereum is the network that powers this to us makes sense and aligns with the values of so many of you and also the the core team in EF.

Um, and we think it's really exciting and um, we think that the capital can be persistent, but we also think it can grow. And whilst we're working with a certain base of of donors and organizations, we hope you have other organizations and donors you want to work with and bring onto this modality and we would like to support you in any way we can. Thank you very much for your time.