NFTs and Crypto for Social Good

hello everyone how are we doing hanging in um so as was just mentioned we're going to get started on a panel around nfts and social good uh my name is Mitch I'll be moderating for the next 20 so minutes I work for giveth.io which is a donation platform so I'm really really excited to start this panel because uh personally this interests me a lot so we've got three panelists with us today uh first off is Ashley Duncan from she survives crypto titties and remind me what was the last one there there was one more oh just just me just generally actually he can awesome cool and then over here we've got Aaron Gambrell uh soon to be TV show host the future of money on Netflix and we'll hear a little bit more about that as well soon and Luciano de Angelo from git coin awesome great so we'll get started first off we'll go one by one tell me a little bit more about yourself and why you're interested in nfts and how that can create charitable action go ahead first Ashley well thank you um my name is Ashley decan on Twitter Ashley Duncan in real life I started in crypto and nfts around early 2021 started with Dogecoin I bought it back in 2017 and then fast forward to 2021 it went to the moon I got super excited and got super into crypto fast forward maybe six months from then I got into nfts and the community was just on fire they were just amazing very welcoming so I dove deep into the nft rabbit hole and started buying selling trading nfts I started tweeting a lot and some of the experience I was having once I docs myself was a little bit wild I got a lot of inappropriate DMS one of the most common DMS was show me your titties so I used that as you know something to joke about in my tweets it ended up getting some traction and I ended up getting a platform and it was really cool to have that platform and a lot of people were starting to create nfts you know or later in 2021 so I decided to create my own tea called crypto titties so they're 250 pixelated titties and all each have their own personality I ended up selling out the collection over uh in October of 2021 and was able to go full time in web 3 which was amazing I had one of my community members reach out to me and say you know what would you do if I asked you how involved you wanted to be in charity like you talk about you know breasts all the time why don't you donate to breast cancer and I had a friend that actually passed away the year before from Brad breast cancer it was something that I was really passionate about so I decided to donate 25 of my earnings to crypto charity through the giving block so I chose the American Cancer Society because they do donate some of the highest amounts to you know their cancer organizations and we were able to raise about 30 000 initially through the projects so it really lit me up about the space I connect with the American Cancer Society partnered with them and started full-time in the nft and charity space so it's been a really exciting time for me tell me Ashley I got a question for you based on your experience with crypto titties would you say that titties are a public good or a public great say that that titties should be used for good obviously that's what I choose to do with them some people do not so if you're going to talk about them or use them in your art or do anything you should use them for social good why not awesome thank you uh Erin let's hear a little bit about yourself I love your answer by the way I think everybody here is a fan of titties so you guys need to follow Ashley focus on her project um yeah so my name is Aaron better known as the blonde broker on Twitter I am yes you're right an upcoming TV show host of the future of money which you guys will see on Netflix next year I'm a public speaker at all the conferences content creator influencer but my main focus is on education because one our system has completely failed us an assistant in the in the sense that we need to focus on monetary education so the TV shows and Anthony Bourdain style docu-series where my co-host and I are traveling the world interviewing founders of different D5 protocols web 3 startups to teach you guys about the future of money why are our currencies devaluing and why we are transitioning over to digital assets so it's super exciting I've also been involved in the nft space for quite some time and have worked with Charities alongside Ashley so I'm super excited for this panel but uh glad you guys are all here and just a shout out to her she is the developer for the she survives project which is a secondary project so she is not only super talented she is super smart awesome thanks for that intro and Luciano hi everybody my name is Luciano I found the cryptocurrency club at the University of Albany back in 2018. since then I started working with the getcoin because I love funding public goods um I actually did a created a little shirt uh for creatures world and get coin did a little collaboration for eth Denver uh 100 of the proceeds goes to funding public goods awesome that's great thank you all for that quick intro so we know that donations and philanthropy it's hard it's really really tough to get people to motivate to like do it and like donate money and like give their time or their hard-earned cash to like good causes it's it's a struggle often it's just like a lose-lose scenario where like people are working for like barely livable wages there's no funding in it to like do the good that you want so what are some ideas around like experimental or like innovative ways that we can use nfts blockchain all this wonderful tech we see around us here and direct that towards funding philanthropy non-profits and Charities um maybe I'll swing it over to Aaron first yeah so I think uh what we have seen uh charity nft projects struggle with in the past is that most people are focused on Roi they want to make profits when they get whitelisted for an nft they want to be able to immediately sell and then they walk away from that project so Ashley and I were working on a project for seven months and we decided that we were going to do 40 donations to American Cancer Society and we got a lot of backlash on that specific number that 40 percent it wasn't enough they wanted a hundred percent of the proceeds donated to the charity and we sat there and we talked about it we were like how do we pay the artist how do we pay the community leaders how do we pay anybody that is running the Discord how do we pay ourselves for seven months of time so there becomes kind of this stigma in this problem our charity projects that are associated with nfts should they be a hundred percent donated to that charity or organization or a smaller person John and why is it frowned upon that you know we're even trying to give back and donate to begin with so I think I think that is going to be a constant struggle and if we can't continue to raise awareness and have panels like this and talk about it maybe people will be happy I hope so um but we are doing good there's a lot of projects out there I don't know if you want to take over from here and what you guys are working on yeah so actually what we're building here at the hackathons a little public good slider so if you have yield generating strategy uh you can allocate 100 of that yield back to funding public goods you can also allocate one percent of that yield so it's totally up to you uh so we're just trying to create more ways to fund public goods bottom up because right now the collective incentive to fund public goods is very high but our individual incentive to fund public goods is very low so I think the solution to one of these problems is to create more fun and immersive experiences hence the creatures collab because people will be willing to support public goods and Charities if they actually get something in return um so we just have to get a little creative and and we have to find out what people actually want uh want to own want to purchase and want to represent themselves as and if we do that hard work then I think we can successfully fund public goods at scale awesome anything to add Ashley yeah um I actually just based on our experience which she's lives project you know we decided to change that to 100 of a donation to charity just because you know we wanted to do some other things with a project add some utilities but we decided since it was a primarily a charity project we decided to do that with that and I talked to a lawyer actually the other day because I really believe that tokenizing crypto donations is just a really wonderful thing you know having an nft in your wallet that represents a charity that you affiliate with the most something that you could wear as your pfv or something that you can show your friends I think that's a really good way to connect with the community imagine being able to go to a charity event be able to access that through an nft and show your friends hey this is my entity and I donated this and this do you want to join the community the American Cancer Society community that I donated to I feel like tokenizing that and still allowing people to use you know the nft and crypto donations for a write-off is really important so that's something that I think will really overcome the barrier that people will know they get the benefit benefits of the donation and that the organization receives the money and still gets something in return that makes that kind of worth their their time awesome I really really like that that's really really cool um so moving on from there a little bit more into some hot takes in the market [Music] um so we know that in the nft world right now people are all worried about Creator fees royalties platform fees all that good stuff there but considering how big these nft marketplaces are like looking at places like Open Sea blur wearable all of them do you think given the size of the market and the volume that marketplaces have an obligation to start contributing to public goods or charities uh maybe we'll start with Luciano so yeah that's a great question so funding public goods at the end of the day is a privilege um so if you do have the the privilege to fund public goods and Charities then you definitely should however uh if you only fund public goods or fun Charities because you're paid to um then you're probably not going to successfully fund public goods so at the end of the day we have to we have to we have to actually support those who want to fund public goods out of the goodness of their heart and not because they're they're getting some some sort of Leverage out of it um so if nft platforms are only funding public goods because they want to access our communities um and access us as individuals then it's not necessarily uh the most beneficial thing however if we can help them understand why they should fund public goods and fund these Charities and they can do it uh for a more altruistic reason than I think it would be more beneficial but like I said if you're getting paid to fund public goods and and uh into fund Charities then you're probably not going to successfully do it you have to do it because you actually care about the problem that you're trying to solve awesome um either of you want to jump in there yeah I I think um this is kind of a controversial topic but a good question position to focus on charity projects but they could feature them every now and then right to raise awareness I kind of think it's more on the creators the content creators as a whole and the project itself to make it number one to make it number two but we struggle with you see honk honk is fun to say on Twitter right Bonk is fun to say on Twitter all of these other communities have fun little catchphrases how do we make fundraising fun how do we make charity fun or like giving back fun I think that's something that we have to work on as a community and as a project and really focus on like bringing everybody together and be proud to be donating to a higher cause and for good and make it really fun and catchy and enjoyable to be here I I totally agree with both points and I think also you know I definitely don't think that anyone should feel obligated to it's not something you should be pressure to be doing but if the you know let's say if openc added a feature to where you could choose the the donation the organization of your choice and the donation percentage of your transaction or sale I think that would be a really cool thing because then people would easily be able to do it they could work with the giving block to create that charitable donation receipt and it would be the easiest way to donate not only just from their sale but maybe from their purchase so I think that doing something small like that could make it easy and maybe fun for people to experience awesome so what I hear is some controversy maybe it's not on the marketplaces to have an obligation but like it would be cool if they would spend some more time like building better options for people who want to give and it's on us to convince them to do so yeah for the right reasons exactly yeah make sure that it's the right reasons that they're doing it too so um in the nft world you generally have like three entities right the marketplaces the creators and the collectors so given this topic of like creating social good with nfts how can we combine all of those three entities and have them like mesh together and create solutions that eventually go towards like bringing public goods and non-profits more to the Forefront of the conversation do you guys have any ideas of like how all these people can come together and like build something really awesome well you know there's a really great example of something that happened like that sometime last year uh if anybody knows who Andrew Wang is he's one of the leaders in the space and he actually worked on a project during the Ukraine crisis called relief he was able to raise over 410 eth over a million dollars for the Ukraine disaster that was happening he pulled together influencers creators Builders developers artists all together and made it a fun tokenized way to donate and donated all the proceeds to charity and the entire Community got together and did this for no benefit other than Ukraine which was amazing and I feel like if we all did stuff like that you know maybe every month for the charity of choice or something of that nature I think it would be a fun way to do it and I think that instead of doing pump and dumps that's what we should be focusing on honestly yeah and there there's a I mean we are doing a good job now I I do want to applaud everyone in the web three in the crypto space for supporting these higher causes there was a statistic leading up to the beginning of this year that 42 of the crypto donators have donated a thousand dollars or more versus Fiat where only 33 of the donors have donated a thousand dollars or more we can always up those numbers the money is here but coming together as a community as content creators As Leaders as people in the web 2 world that are running these charity organizations if we can all band together and work together we're going to come up with other innovative ways to raise awareness for nfts for good yeah the dancer is definitely exactly what they said it's to get creative and it's to do the hard work of actually trying to figure out what people want to participate in uh what social cause do they care about and how can we give them something in return for their money uh that that they're happy with and if we can if we can hit every single one of those points then we can fund Charities and we can fund public goods awesome that's really great to hear from all of you so we've got just a couple minutes left I just want to kind of summarize it and give everybody listening something to chew on based on everything we've talked about and all of your own personal experiences with nfts and social good what is the single biggest problem in this theme that we need to work on and Tackle going into the future the incentive structure most people are incentivized to fund public goods and and to fund Charities right now in the same in the traditional world right if you work for a non-for-profit it's because you're paid to if you care about the cause that's just an X that's just an added benefit so if we can if we can try and uh create a way for people who care about these causes to match with people who actually can solve them and we can create a little flywheel of actually solving these problems with people who actually are experiencing them instead of the people at the top who want to make the most money off leveraging those who actually experience the problem I think that that's honestly we just need to take control of the people that are taking advantage of the donation aspect like some people are starting the nft projects or crypto projects saying they're going to donate to charity and they don't do it and that creates a stigma that creates a stigma for you know web 2 people that come in they're like this is a scam you're actually saying that you're you're going to donate but you're not and that's the biggest problem that we have to face so we need to crack down on those people and get rid of those people in the space and have you know people like us that are trying to do good for the world people like all of you I'm sure yeah and marketing I think uh that's something that we could touch on more is marketing like I said like finding catchy phrases and getting everybody excited and I guess I'm walking around the conference and how many of these booths and companies are donating to a good cause I don't know because I don't see it on the marketing so that's kind of something that I would point out awesome well thank you all were almost bang on time I'm wondering if this is something that we do questions for no anybody if not we're going to take photos up here there we go so you know what the three of you are doing is definitely in alignment I think a lot of people out there are trying to do as well is just we don't see it as much down to the marketing element something I've been doing personally with the charitable you know contribution is working with small businesses that you know have an artist that they're connected with that share some sort of ideological shared philosophy that is that care that is giving back nature and then having the artist create the collection working with the business to kind of do this cross-promotion and then finding a charity and obviously you have to do the research on the charity I mean there's so many that is just they're bloated they say they're you know raising all this money but only a fraction of that gets delivered to the actual you know to the need to so I think that research and advertising and promoting the Charities that do all the work and because this is on a blockchain you have that transparency of which Charities are actually being the most effective so I think that's an important piece as well agreed we should bring him up here yeah which is the next panel with us we are just out of time there so everyone give a round of applause for a panelist here and thank you all three of you for joining today yeah thank you thank you