GoodDollar

DAO Members Interviewed:

  1. Anna Stone, Co-Founder
  2. Jessica Salama, Core Team
  3. Steve, Community Lead

Interviewer: Deepa

What is GoodDollar

GoodDollar protocol is a standard for deploying free money as a public good. It achieves this by the issuance of a daily distribution of GoodDollar (a reserve-backed token) as daily universal basic income (UBI) to members, empowering everyone - regardless of socio-economic background - to onboard into crypto, start learning, and join the coming wealth boom. Anyone can receive real, free, reserve-backed crypto straight to their phone, so you don’t need to buy crypto or invest in order to participate and learn.

To emphasize the point: anyone, anywhere with a smartphone with internet access can participate. Onboarding is as simple as signing up for a GoodDollar wallet and taking a selfie to confirm identity.

The goal of GoodDollar is to use the mechanisms of DeFi as an effective infrastructure for solving global wealth inequality. It achieves this in two ways: 1) anyone in the world can create a non-custodial wallet and receive crypto UBI, and 2) the capital concentrated in DeFi within staking and liquidity pools provides a new pathway for sustainably funding a decentralized universal basic income system at scale.

GoodDollar is supported by eToro, the world’s largest social investment trading network. Aiming to remove the barriers to investing across all assets, eToro grew rapidly during the crypto boom, which inspired CEO Yoni Assia to explore ways to move beyond traditional corporate social responsibility programs and build a truly innovative, long-lasting, and open-source alternative. eToro committed to sponsoring research and development in this area, and this resulted eventually in the GoodDollar protocol.

GoodDollar protocol is a blockchain-based, anti-inequality UBI protocol built with the purpose of letting crypto flow freely to people who need money the most, in a manner that enables them to learn about crypto by experiencing it. - Co-Founder, Anna Stone

In the countries where GoodDollar is active, community members facilitate the off-ramps using mobile minutes or other forms of mobile money.

With a truly global community, active in over 181 countries, GoodDollar continues to improve its protocol and is becoming a truly scalable, sustainable UBI system governed by its members (through a DAO). After two years, a robust community is beginning to emerge.

The bottom-up economy, as described in the protocol’s initial whitepaper, has become real. The worldwide adoption of $G has validated GoodDollar’s overall thesis for building a crypto-native UBI protocol: $G improves the lives of its recipients around the world, regardless of the amount of the UBI given.

How Do They DAO

  • The GoodDollar protocol was always intended to be community-managed. It transitioned to a DAO in Jan 2022, 3 years after launching the UBI protocol.
  • It has adopted a progressive decentralization approach, rather than going all in from the beginning. GoodDollar aims to decentralize one function at a time. Currently, the hiring of community leads and in-country ambassadors is managed via the DAO.
  • Hiring for DAO jobs is carried out within the community, on the basis that $G token holders have ‘skin in the game’ and are best suited to steward the GoodDollar protocol.

We are hiring directly from the community of members. You need to bring in people early that have the skin in the game. - Anna Stone, Co-Founder GoodDollar

  • GoodDollar members need to be active contributors for a minimum of 6 months in order to participate in the DAO.
  • A separate DAO governance token known as GOOD is used for voting and is different from the $G UBI token. The guiding principle here is that people should be able to earn rather than buy the influence.
  • Collaborative decision-making takes place via discussions and community calls with the final proposal put up for voting on Snapshot.
  • The tech stack comprises Discourse and Snapshot for governance and voting, Notion for documentation, Telegram, Discord, and Twitter for community engagement and communication, and Safe for the multisig wallet.
  • The org structure is concentric: with a core team (full-time employees hired by the GoodDollar Foundation) as the innermost circle. The next circle consists of initial DAO community members, who hire the next outer circle, and so on.
  • The ultimate goal is to make the DAO responsible for setting the direction of the protocol, which in turn is powered by the community of $G token holders.

For a deeper understanding of Good Dollar and how they operate, please refer to the conversation with GooD Dollar builders.

Interview with Anna Stone, Co-Founder, GoodDollar Interview with Jessica Salama, Core Team, GoodDollar