Please describe your proposed solution.
“Even a tiny contribution is enough to accomplish something outstanding when a good intention is shared with a proportional number of small benefactors”
SharedLink's primary focus is to provide economic and technological support to the Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that play a fundamental and active role, on a daily basis, in the defense of human rights and in the protection of the world in which all of us are living.
This goal is achieved through an innovative system that allows anyone to support their favorite organizations using cryptocurrencies in the fastest, most secure, and easiest way possible, via several different fundraising methodologies and yield optimization strategies.
For the first time, NGOs have access to an additional tool to gain more funds for their humanitarian missions, getting exposure to a way broader audience. Also, supporters who can’t afford to send funds via a specific donation can still contribute to the organization while growing their capital: something that would never be possible using legacy systems and FIAT currency.
While the original idea behind SharedLink was to replicate the effectiveness of legacy models, like telephone fundraisers (better known as “Solidarity SMS”) to the cryptocurrency world, it has been developed to agglomerate several different tools in a single place and automatically extend efficiency for the benefit of the member NGOs.
Using their usual means of communication with the public, NGOs supported by SharedLink can simply advertise the web address of their specific landing page on sharedlink.org, for example, by providing a link on their website or publishing a QR code in other promotional material.
Meanwhile, leveraging the native features provided by the Cardano blockchain, the technology deployed by SharedLink will automatically grow the collected amount, to maximize the results.
<u>How did it start?</u>
"In March 2006, Emergency (an Italian NGO) launched a solidarity SMS campaign to build a cardiac surgery hospital in Sudan. The success of this campaign made it possible to start work on what, a year later, became a center of excellence to guarantee highly specialized and free care to the sick in Sudan and the nine neighboring countries.
As a volunteer for this NGO and a nerd, I had the dream to build an organization that, leveraging the power of micro-transactions, could benefit other NGOs for their humanitarian projects. Unfortunately, at the time, Cardano was not yet around, and that dream could not be realized.
Many years later, on August 13, 2021, Doctor Gino Strada, benefactor, and founder of Emergency died. I was very sad, but the very same day, Charles Hoskinson had one of his “Surprise AMA” on YouTube. I can’t remember exactly what he said, but something lit up that very old dream of mine.
A few weeks later I started putting ideas together to understand how it is possible to achieve that goal, greatly optimizing the results, thanks to the native features provided by the Cardano blockchain"
-- Davide
<u>How does SharedLink work?</u>
NGOs can apply to join SharedLink using the provided form on the sharedlink.org website and including any relevant information.
Once the request is received, the members of our community will vote in favor of the inclusion of the applicant NGO; the votes are weighted according to the amount of owned governance tokens ($SHLNK). Once the application is accepted, SharedLink will take care of deploying and managing the necessary infrastructure for having a specific landing page on the sharedlink.org website and a new, dedicated stake-pool on the Cardano blockchain for the applicant NGO.
All the donations collected with the above-mentioned fundraising tools will be received by a new wallet, that will be created by the NGO and configured to stake to this new pool, for the usual ~4.5% year-over-year compounded interest rate that is earned by staking on the Cardano blockchain: that’s why, for the first time, supporters will contribute to the NGO also by just staking to its stake pool, while the amount of ADA they own will automatically grow in their wallets.
While SharedLink will keep being the official operator for this new pool (taking care of all the necessary technical and management activities), all the collected rewards, minus a minimal fee for covering the required operational costs, will be transferred to the NGO’s wallet, drastically improving the compounded amount of collected funds available to the NGO.
The number of blocks produced by a stake pool is proportional to the amount of ADA staked with it: it is, therefore, necessary to advertise the existence of the new stake pool and try to get as many delegators as possible to optimize earnings, and the NGO should put some effort into it by reaching out to their supporters. SharedLink will help out with that by publishing the necessary information on the website, engaging with the community, and (most importantly) providing a certain amount of $SHLNK as an extra reward to the delegators, for the first weeks after the launch of the new stake pool. A proportional amount of extra $SHLNK will be provided to the NGO’s wallet, which can be used to participate in the SharedLink governance or sold for additional funds.
There are already quite a few existing Stake Pool Operators who decided to donate part of their rewards to specific NGOs or other causes, and we think that it is simply amazing.
SharedLink will offer a more structured service, that is 100% dedicated to the member NGOs, and basically "owned" by them, without the burden of its managing costs.
Together with the provided fundraising tools, it is, therefore, possible to maximize the compounded results.
<u>Fundraising tools on sharedlink.org at launch</u>
In our long-term vision, we want to deploy several different ways to collect donations and grow funds for the approved NGOs, but for this Catalyst round we prefer to avoid increasing too much the scope of the project, and we will focus only on direct (wallet-to-wallet) donations.
All the collected amounts will be transferred to the NGO’s wallet. Those funds will automatically grow, thanks to the above-mentioned staking rewards and the extra operator rewards that SharedLink will transfer regularly.
Those fundraising tools will be available using a specific landing page, with a URL dedicated to the NGO. The landing page will be configurable to enable the desired features and can be generic or customized to focus on specific campaigns.
No extra managing effort will be required by the NGO, which can instead focus on its main activities.
- Direct peer-to-peer (wallet-to-wallet) donations
Microtransactions are one of the most traditional yet effective ways to collect funds for humanitarian campaigns.
While with the old-school telephone fundraising people can just send an SMS to donate a small amount of money with their phone, they can now use the same device to also send some crypto.
In the future, donors may be incentivized by offering some kind of reward as a “thank you” message, like an NFT randomly chosen from a specific, pre-minted collection.
- On-click-staking
For the first time, supporters will contribute to the NGO also by just staking to its stake pool, while the amount of ADA they own will automatically grow in their wallets. Accessing the NGO portal on SharedLink, anybody can just press a button to stake their web wallet to the NGO's stake pool.
<u>Other fundraising ideas for the future</u>
As soon as SharedLink will be successful, we will implement other fundraising tools, to improve our service even more. To achieve this, we may access other Catalyst rounds.
Those are the first services that we plan to add:
- NFT marketplace
Famous artists actively support many NGOs. It is pretty common for them to donate some of their creations or belongings to NGOs, which can then be used for charity auctions and so on. We think that the same concept can be applied to digital art and NFTs.
Using SharedLink, digital assets can be minted as NFTs, and all the income generated by selling those NFTs can directly go to the NGO’s wallet, without any cut or excessive fee.
- Sale of lottery tickets
It is also possible to get more creative and, instead of selling a specific NFT, use it as the prize for a charity lottery.
Supporters can buy an NFT ticket. Winning NFT tickets can then be redeemed in exchange for the actual prize.
<u>Considerations about Governance and Tokenomics for $SHLNK</u>
We know that tokenomics is not something that can be underestimated. We prefer to conduct a serious study, even hiring external consultants if required, and we plan to have it done during the first months and release it at the launch.
This is even more important for our idea of governance in SharedLink: we want our organization to be "owned" as much as possible by the included NGOs, their supporters, and regular people who are taking into serious consideration the main problems that are affecting the world. This definition usually doesn't apply to common VCs.
The most important, and first to be implemented governance solution will be the tool that allows token holders to evaluate the credentials of another applicant NGO because we want to make sure that SharedLink's focus keeps being on non-business-centric activities.
Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.
We think that one of the most important goals of this challenge is to make the Cardano ecosystem more connected to real-world activities. We believe in empowering the right organizations, which are focused on solving specific problems. This is probably the most effective way to use our first-class blockchain technology for improving the world.
With our proposal, we do not need to “reinvent the wheel”, but we simply need to show existing NGOs that we can implement a new way of leveraging micro-transactions to gain additional funds for their humanitarian campaigns.
This will directly benefit the Cardano ecosystem by attracting adoption from millions of small benefactors, who already support their favorite organizations using legacy solutions.
Also, by deploying (single) stake pools for the supported organizations, we directly improve the decentralization of our blockchain.
What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?
As our focus is on both the people within Cardano and also outside the blockchain ecosystem, we see a few challenges to be addressed:
- Some NGOs may be skeptical about cryptocurrencies because their daily focus is oriented to totally different activities, and they don't have enough knowledge about the technology.
- In many different countries, there are fiscal benefits when donating to NGOs with legacy systems and FIAT currency. Due to the lack of regulation, we may not offer the same advantages.
- If an onboarding campaign doesn't go very well and there are not enough ADA delegated to the new stake pool, we risk releasing too many governance tokens.
To mitigate the first issue, we need to approach new NGOs in a professional way, showing them how SharedLink can help and that we don't plan to replace their current fundraising systems, but instead, we'll be giving them also a new one, that can be extremely effective. For the same reason, we don't think that the second issue will be a game-breaker, and the situation can only get better in the future.
To mitigate the third issue, we really need to think carefully about our token distribution and onboarding strategy for new NGOs. One idea is to start a first fundraising campaign, before deploying the new stake pool, that lasts a few days or weeks.
During that time, SharedLink will announce the event and the NGO will reach out to their supporters.
The collected amount of ADA raised during this campaign will be used as a pledge for the new stake pool and will give us an indication of the effective amount of additional tokens that we should release. This way, NGOs that show the most effort, will benefit more from their presence on SharedLink and will have a more substantial weight in the governance process.