Welcome AidPool: Where Charity Meets the Best of DeFi in an Easy-to-Digest Format
It’s been 3 years now since the beginning of the AidCoin journey — and more than 10 years since our team got involved in the charity-fundraising industry.
AidCoin was among the first projects to attempt to bridge crypto and the non profit sector. We saw tremendous potential in the transparency and the trust that blockchain could bring to the industry, as well as the freedom that crypto donations could offer to donors. And we still do, but there appeared to be one trick:
From Crypto Revolution to Educating Charities: Why we Shifted our Goals?
We erroneously thought that crypto donations and blockchain-based transactions would be easily embraced by the non profit sector — since it’s in their own interest, to start with. But as we developed our project and advanced in Customer Development, currying on workshop to “educate” the clients, we’ve realized how difficult it was to actually make this happen.
Everything from opening a non-custodial wallet on AidChain and saving the private key (some charities actually lost them!) to receiving crypto donations and trying to spend that «money» turned out to be incredibly hard for charities. Why? In a nutshell: because the sector is quite rigid in how things are done and most processes remain unchanged for decades, including the means of fundraising. You can read more about it in our here but today we’ll just stress that our key lesson was that before jumping to crypto, charities need to make a step into the digital world first. Thus we first need to educate them to go digital — and only then push for crypto adoption.
Today, it’s been more than a year since we realized this and took on this special educational role. We’ve achieved truly a lot in this direction by working with the leading organizations— you can read about just few of our successful cases in our Medium blog, for example here, here or here. But what’s more important, since we never gave up on our key crypto-related concept, we’ve managed to identify some new opportunities in crypto that would get both charities and donors excited.
Building AidCoin 2.0: Lessons Learned, Solutions Altered
After all our experiences with charities, we’ve understood that the major issue they were facing, besides the very fact that everything happens online, was that they refused to deal with the «classic» non-custodial crypto infrastructure. They wanted us to take them through the process on their behalf so they don’t have to substantially change how they receive donations.
They needed a safe yet easy-to-use custodial platform for handling crypto donations and payments and all that comes along with this, like if they were using a bank.
So even though that is not fully in tune with the spirit of decentralization — it’s better to start off with that rather than never onboard on the crypto journey at all. Thus that is precisely what we’ve built for them.
Together with our tech partner who created Flypme, our instant crypto to DAI payment widget, we conceived AidPool.
AidPool is a side platform that will help our charity partners to handle crypto assets as if they were managing their bank account — which is something they’re perfectly used to. At the same time, it will also provide more use-cases for the AID token and give more opportunities to the altruistic holders to both multiply their crypto assets and contribute to a good cause at the same time.
Once launched, AidPool will be a lending and borrowing platform with staking functionality where crypto holders will be able to stake their assets at a certain reward rate while also giving a fraction of those rewards to charity. Through this, charities will multiply their donations in a custodial yet safe manner without the hurdles of directly dealing with crypto — which is something they’re yet to embrace. At the same time, they will also be able to benefit from staking of their already received donations and eventually convert all this crypto to fiat money.
That being said, the new AidPool Platform perceives a double goal:
to give to our charities the possibility to receive more donations as well as stake the already received donations in a seamless way;
to give both to our existing community and to external warm-hearted crypto holders the possibility to stake their crypto assets while doing charity.
The first point is pretty simple and the demand for it has been proved through out interactions with charities. First of all, any charity would be happy to receive more donations — especially if they don’t have to handle crypto on their own for this. Second, some charity fundraising campaigns last for months — so why not use that time to gain interests on the received donations by staking them?
The second direction though still has to be tested and validated among our community of friends and investors. But even now, we’ve gathered enough preliminary data showing us that AID holders would love this new opportunity and so will the overall crypto community — especially considering how everyone is going crazy around DeFi (decentralized finance) now.
Here’s how AidPool is going to work:
- Crypto holders will stake their crypto assets at a certain APR rate. Out of that rate, they will set a certain percentage that would go to charity as a donation. We implemented a smart contract that connects with Compound — a decentralized protocol that allows users to lend and borrow crypto — and with Cream Finance — a fork of Compound that offers far more assets (sometimes with better APR rates).
- That donation will go to a centralized pool (AidPoool as we call it) and will be used to launch a growth hacking campaign supporting the charity that will be voted on by the community. As already mentioned, throughout our educational activities in the past 1.5 years we have undertaken tons of growth hacking activities. There, we demonstrated that we are capable to raise more money that what we invest in the promo campaigns, showing a high ROI in media advertising when comparing the costs and the donations received. This means the funds taken from the AidPool will be handled with very high efficiency and in the best interest of the chosen charity. At the same time, the charities will receive precisely the results they crave for — but without the need of handling the crypto wallets and so on.
- To make all of this work in the interest of the AidCoin community, the platform fees will be paid in AID by the charities based on the volume of transactions.
- Eventually, the raised funds can be converted to fiat money right at the platform and withdrawn to a bank account.
Here’s Why we Propose to Manage the Raised Funds through a Centralized Pool?
Now this is the most interesting part! Most of the time charity budgets are very limited and the management is very risk-averse in terms of investing in new innovative fundraising campaigns. That’s why when we worked with charities, it was always hard to even get a chance to prove them that such campaigns DO work!
With this AidPool, we’ll receive a chance to implement new innovative fundraising campaigns based on the raised funds. Why? Because in this case, the charities will be less cautious as the money invested in these campaign was given to them from aside. Thus we will be able to break that barrier of caution and they’ll have an opportunity to see that such campaigns actually work! This will launch a positive cycle for them, allowing us to change their mindset and further engage them into more innovative activities for fundraising — including with crypto.
Together with us, they’ll get more bold when it comes to thinking out of the box and creating true innovation, experimenting even with what seems to be impossible — just like we did with the super successful campaign we launched in support of Santa Rita da Cascia.
This way, everybody wins! The donors multiply their funds as well as put their crypto assets to work while doing good. The charities receive more funds while finally welcoming innovation into their lives and getting closer to the great opportunities that blockchain has in store.
