Apr 24, 2021
An Introduction to Pupper and Community Incentivized Fundraising
Not long ago…
…I found myself tossing and turning in bed for the umpteenth night in a row.
Anxious by default, I couldn’t stop thinking about the state of the world.
Somewhere along the way, and honestly who knows where, it felt like a wrinkled mixture of ego, apathy, defeatism, instability, trolling, and general gloom had begun to suffuse much of our daily news cycle, conversations, and even relationships.
Spiraling, I jotted down some quick thoughts:
- Could negativity be harnessed for good?
- Could self-interest be harnessed for good?
- From a macro perspective, could communities tinged with both good and bad actors be incentivized to come together around a central goal that would ultimately make the world a better place?
I went back to bed…
…And after many days of conversations with friends, family, and the DeFi community, we launched this lil’ guy:
Pupper
A decentralized, charity, meme-token experiment.
Here’s how it breaks down:
- Pupper is the name of an ERC-20 token built on the Ethereum blockchain. Its ticker symbol is $PUP.
- 1,000,000,000,000,000 $PUP were minted on April 21st, 2021.
- Half of the supply (500T $PUP) was added to a Uniswap Liquidity Pool, balanced with 5.5 ETH raised by founding Pupper Team members. Then, the access (or “keys”) to that pool were burned for all time.
- The other half of the supply (500T $PUP) was divided up evenly among four exceptional charities with publicly listed ethereum addresses. Those charities are:
The Electronic Frontier Foundation — the leading nonprofit organization defending civil liberties in the digital world. Founded in 1990, EFF champions user privacy, free expression, and innovation through impact litigation, policy analysis, grassroots activism, and technology development. EFF’s mission is to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people of the world.
Watsi — a nonprofit that lets anyone donate as little as $5 to directly fund surgical care for patients around the world. They believe everyone deserves access to healthcare, and are committed to using technology to make healthcare a reality for those who might not otherwise be able to afford it.
The Internet Archive — a non-profit building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, they provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public. Their mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.
Tor Project — a non-profit advancing human rights and defending privacy online through free software and open networks.
- Rather than donate in one lump sum, we partnered with the smart-contract wizards at Sablier.Finance to lock-up and pay out a total of 125T $PUP to the wallets of each of the above charities every second of every day for the next 20 years. Those donations can be tracked in real-time here: EFF, Watsi, Internet Archive, and Tor Project, and proof of the lockups can be found here: EFF, Watsi, Internet Archive, and Tor Project.
- It is worth reiterating that as a result of the above lockups and burns, the founders of Pupper no longer have any control over the original supply or liquidity. The team has since bought back into the supply with their own personal funds but did not do so until outside transactions had taken place.
So why do all this?
Our hypothesis is that by creating a community-driven token that supports and is intrinsically linked to charities over the long-term, we can all benefit.
As a result of the community’s economic self-interest, evolving brand awareness, and marketing (🌶 memes), these charities stand to receive a higher-grossing and more consistent income stream than if a handful of people donated on their own.
Moreover, Pupper forces us to reflect on what we invest in and how it shapes the world.
We can’t wait to see what the community builds…together!
