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eToro, a well-known social trading and investment platform, has recently launched Gooddollar, a not-for-profit Universal Basic Income (UBI) project which was first conceived in 2018. It is sponsored by eToro as one of their corporate social responsibility intiatives.
At its very essence, UBI provides a guaranteed minimum income to everybody regardless of their circumstances or work history and allowing them to afford the cost of their basic needs. While the idea flourished in Sir Thomas Moore's Utopia, it has failed to gain traction with the conventional governments here in the real world. Fortunately, the advancement of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency has leapt in to fill the void.
As a point of comparison, we will look at 2 blockchain-based UBI projects in this article, Mannabase and SwiftDemand. Both are online platforms which provide their unique cryptocurrency (or digital currency) as a regular basic income to their users. Neither of their currencies are backed by any form of assets or fiat currency. This means that neither Manna nor Swifts have any inherent value. Instead, their value is determined by the free market. In the case of Swifts, there is no available market hence its value cannot be determined. Manna, on the otherhand, can be traded on SouthXchange where it is worth USD0.0026165 according to CoinGecko.
Unlike Mannabase and SwiftDemand, Gooddollar (G$ )is an ERC-20 token backed by a reserve system (the GoodReserve Smart Contract). The reserve currently comprises USD6,884.73 worth of Compound DAI (cDAI) and Compound (COMP). The price of 1 G$ is initially set at USD0.0001. However, this is expected to vary after launch based on supply and demand.
A variable amount of G$ is minted everyday, depending on the amount of interest moved into the GoodReserve and the Reserve Ratio (ratio between assets in GoodReserve vs G$ in circulation). The supply of G$ is capped at 2.2 trillion. For more information on the Gooddollar Ecosystem, please refer to the diagram below.
A portion of the minted G$ is set aside for distribution every 24 hours as basic income. The cycle starts every day at 11:40:12 GMT. This pool of G$ will be divided equally based on the number of active users (made at least 1 claim in the past 14 days) registered in the system. Any unclaimed G$ after 11:40:11GMT will be added to the pool for the next cycle.
Gooddollar does not have a referral system. Indeed, there is no advantage to be had by introducing a whole busload of friends, family, neighbours or strangers to Gooddollar. In fact, it might even be a serious disadvantage since the amount of G$ you can claim every day decreases in proportion to the number of active members.
To put it simply, the more people you invite, the lesser G$ you get.
But whether you share this project with your friends or not, you are more than welcome to join the 5,791 (according to Gooddollar's website) claimants on Gooddollar. After all, it is a UBI project.