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Crypto for Good! Positive Cryptocurrency & Blockchain Projects



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How can crypto and blockchain be used for the greater good?

In our last episode, we dove into the basics of cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies. While the world awakens to the phenomenon of these technologies, their positive potential is only starting to be uncovered. More than just a decentralized method for securely and quickly sending currencies around the world, the blockchain enables many other applications, including peer-to-peer "smart contracts", data collection and the creation of digital assets. These, in turn, allow for further benefits.

One such opportunity is social impact investment, which may become available to a broader audience as private assets such as wind turbines and solar farms are listed for public ownership. Similar to crowdfunding, but with the addition of smart contracts, social impact investments can automatically and securely pay out shareholder profits as they are generated, minimizing the need for costly and time-consuming legal and financial intermediaries.

This would allow many more people to own these assets much more easily, incentivizing development of green, sustainable projects. Renewable energy exchanges also have great potential. Localized peer-to-peer exchanges will allow renewable energy delivery to become better distributed. Powerledger, a Perth-based company, recently raised funds to build a blockchain-based solar power exchange to allow solar panel owners to trade surplus energy with their neighbors or apartment complexes.

Renewable energy exchanges could create entire energy economies. Companies such as WePower and SunExchange are already entering the market. Highly divisible, crypto-currencies have also made micro-donations much more feasible. New fundraising strategies requesting very small donations from huge donor pools allow collection of infinitesimal "dust", tiny fractions of tokens on crypto exchanges. Like real dust, the accumulation can be huge! Charities could pair this with smart contracts for their donors, for example 0.0000001 of a Bitcoin being transferred to your charity of choice every time you make a purchase.

Voting is also another area that could be positively changed by the blockchain. Trust-less, easily accessible voting systems could strengthen democracy. Blockchains' decentralized and permanent nature make them a good match for secure, convenient voting.

Scientific and medical research could also be improved dramatically. Researchers and scientists are now adopting this blockchain-based method of providing trust at scale, which has the potential to add value at all stages of data collection and sharing. ResearchHub, a recent blockchain-based effort, is backed by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong to foster the open communication of science and therefore speed up scientific discovery. Academics can use ResearchHub to upload, share, and discuss research articles and results, which are organized into different specialized 'hubs'.

A newly created ERC20 token, ResearchCoin (RSC), has been created to help bring this nascent community together and incentivize contribution to the platform.

Decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) such as VitaDAO are improving funding for research into human longevity and healthy aging. At present, intellectual property assets and patents are the core drivers for funding, innovation and value creation in the biopharmaceutical industry. By attaching NFTs to intellectual property rights, the VitaDAO collective will directly hold ownership of its projects, developing a growing asset portfolio.

Gitcoin is another important crypto initiative. What sets Gitcoin apart is its use of Quadratic Funding the mathematically optimal way to fund public good in a democratic community.

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, pioneered this algorithmic crowdfunding approach. It is designed to support multiple projects at once and allocate larger matching funds to the most popular projects. Simply put, the system favors projects with the largest amount of community support, and amplifies the power of smaller donations.
This way, small donations have much greater power, and the matching pool puts that power to work. Transhuman Coin is yet another example of crypto-for-good.

VitaDAO, Gitcoin, and Transhuman Coin are financial supporters of lifespan.io, our parent organization.

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#Cryptocurrency #Blockchain #Bitcoin
Category
Cryptocurrencies
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