Providing banking to the unbaked is like providing an empty jug to somebody in the middle of the desert. What they need is irrigation and infrastructure.
Another Christmas has come and gone. My current feelings related to the above are best summarized by Band Aid’s timeless classic, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?”:
And there won’t be snow in Africa this Christmas time
The greatest gift they’ll get this year is life
Where nothing ever grows
No rain nor rivers flow
Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?
Here’s to you
Raise a glass for everyone
Spare a thought this yuletide for the deprived
If the table was turned would you survive
Here’s to them
Underneath that burning sun
You ain’t gotta feel guilt just selfless
Give a little help to the helpless
Do they know it’s Christmas time at all?
Feed the world
I’m sure I did indeed raise a glass while listening to this song during one of the dozen or so times I heard it over the past few weeks. Unfortunately, I’m not so confident that doing so improved our dire reality.
This is another well intentioned song that unfortunately misses the mark. The problem is correct, however the solution, to feed the world, is just slightly off. We must shift our thinking from addressing surface level symptoms (feeding the world) to solving root issues (enabling the world to feed themselves).
Another good, more recent example of this was last year’s show of Twitter oneupsmanship between Elon Musk and the UN (Shakespeare and Washington would be just so proud). The UN tweeted that the world’s billionaires could solve world hunger to which Elon responded to show him the plan to do so. They followed up with a table of the multi billion dollar breakdown to temporarily feed the poor, to which Elon never responded.
Once again, the focus on symptoms rather than root issues left us so close yet so far from progress. People have countless opinions about Elon, which I won’t get into here, though I do believe that had a reasonable plan been presented to address the root issues that he likely would have considered it. You don’t become the most influential person of the year by passing up influence, after all.
Rethinking how we do banking isn’t going to be adequate to address the level of societal shitshow in which we find ourselves; we must redefine commerce entirely.
Fortunately, we live in a time when such redefinition is not only possible but achievable, and for significantly less than the UN’s proposed $6,000,000,000 stopgap budget. Consider Facebook, Twitter and Google: they redefined how society operates and, while they’ve evolved into intensely complicated geopolitical behemoths, the underlying code was written by a bunch of college dropouts.
In fact, we believe we can do it for $60,000, or .001% as much. And, unlike the UN and Elon’s public dunk contest, we’ve actually already made significant progress toward such a goal.
What we’re calling DeFin (though considering ReDeFin, as we feel decentralized finance is already ready for redefinition) will be an omnichannel, white labeled, low/no-code, decentralized finance platform. Through this we will enable applications and organizations to integrate common financial functionality, like mobile wallets, tap to pay, QR payment, and much more.
Forgive us for the litany of buzzwords in the previous paragraph. But, those are buzzwords for good reason: those are the things the modern business demands.
The next question, of course, is how do we differentiate ourselves? Unlike every other startup playing buzzword bingo, our objective is not to make the early movers wealthy. In fact, our plan is to have this organization owned by a nonprofit, the Human Union.
The other major thing to differentiate us returns us to this post’s underlying premise. All the buzzwords in the world still don’t address the dehydrated desert dilemma. For this, we will create a central fund through which individuals and organizations may receive either donations or mutually beneficial loans, providing a more valuable outlet for capital than our bloated capital markets while generating positive societal outcomes. We’ll make it a fund for all humans, perhaps we’ll call it…the Human Fund.
But wait, there’s more! You didn’t think you were going to get out of this without some blockchain, did you?! Everyone look under your chair…you get a blockchain and you get a blockchain and you get a blockchain!
Before we get into the specifics, let us first call attention to the fundamental issues we see with most cryptocurrencies:
- They disproportionately reward early movers, making the US look like a balanced economy
- They waste inordinate amounts of resources, hastening our climate change demise
- They have minimal practical application besides being an extremely volatile store of wealth
That said, they also offer great promise, like increasing financial security, trust and transaction speed while potentially reducing processing cost.
Still, if we hope to achieve crypto viability, the aforementioned issues must be addressed. Fortunately, we have plans to do so, including:
- Every coin generated deposits minimally an equivalent amount into the Human Fund, both for our coin as well as for any others who use our platform to create their own
- We will create a network that leverages excess compute resources to process and store personal data while enabling people to own and prosper from their data
- We will create a real-time fiat-to-crypto exchange and a decentralized, peer-to-peer market based on mutual benefit
A great deal of work remains, however a strong foundation has already been established as our engineering team has completed over 80% of the initial backend. We choose to be transparent about this both because we find transparency is the best strategy and that we seek partnership as we continue this journey.
Regardless of your skillset or knowledge, if you are interested in collaborating to create a financial platform that works for the benefit of all instead of the few, reach out and together we will redefine commerce and society.
