Retroactive funders solve the (comparatively) easy problem.
We're creating a profitable market for impact certificates to solve the hard problem.We want to solve the biggest problems. Climate change, nuclear war, unaligned AI, pandemic risks, longevity, Moloch, etc.
But it's currently hard to make money funding or working on these problems. The solutions to these problems are public goods, which are currently hard to profit off of. We are forced to rely on nation-states or philanthropy to supply these goods.
Enter impact certificates: a way to maximize good while maximizing profit.
Impact certificates are NFTs issued to people who have done something good, e.g. publishing a seminal research paper on carbon capture, starting a new nonprofit to develop and distribute Covid vaccines, or donating to an NGO that directly transfers cash to poor people.
The owner of the impact certificate can sell it to someone else, attributing the impact of the positive action to the new owner. This creates a marketplace where profit-maximizing actors are incentivized to buy undervalued certificates to resell them.
Good impact speculators make a profit and bad speculators lose their money and leave the market. This steers the market where the price of the certificate is tied to how effective the good deed it represents was (e.g. the NFT for 200 tons of CO2 sequestered should be twice as valuable as the NFT for 100 tons of CO2 sequestered).
We believe that this impact marketplace, fully matured, can incentivize capitalism to notice the trillion-dollar bills left on the sidewalk and deploy the full force of the (decentralized) financial system towards supplying these goods.
We are still working on fleshing out and describing the formal incentive mechanism design(s) that could underpin this. As it stands, the current theory relies on informal design.
We are thinking about having a Funding Pool that comes from fees from each transaction in the impact certificate marketplace, as well as any donations. This pool would be managed by experts who will buy up the best impact certificates. We also think it’s likely there will be effective altruism-oriented billionaires who want to buy them up and may follow the guidance of the pool. These large purchasers, including the pool itself, can be viewed as Final Buyers who want to buy and hold certificates to influence smaller actors in the market via demand. Speculators would only want to buy impact certificates that are likely to be bought by these impact-aligned final buyers.
Third parties can create a verification layer by attesting to whether an impact certificate NFT is the original or a scam. Beyond that, they can judge whether it is trustworthy or not, or provide an estimated expected impact along different criteria.
Impact certificates can go out to those who help design the impact marketplace to be more likely to accurately price good things.
We don’t know. Can you help us figure this out?
The existence of philanthropically-minded Final Buyers, mentioned above, will likely motivate buying pressure for smaller traders to buy undervalued certificates in hopes of a profit. There will likely be standard altruistic interest in supporting projects and egoistic interest in collecting and displaying NFTs, though we want to emphasize that we want to incentivize people to buy and sell the certificates in ways that track the actual impact it represents rather than buying what looks good in order to display virtue.
Yes, it’s like a generalized form of carbon credits that can apply to any good thing. An additional difference is that we are implementing certificates as nonfungible tokens to capture the unique data of each impact that was made, whereas carbon credits are typically fungible tokens that don’t differentiate the actions that occurred.
Anything! We are thinking of starting off with focusing on supporting the open-source developer community. We are especially excited about causes the effective altruism movement cares about, such as preventing human extinction risks, global poverty, and animal welfare.
There are charity NFT projects. As far as we know, there are no projects with an explicit focus on reselling the NFTs and using them as a representation for ownership of impacts sellable for profit.
We want more good things to happen. We think that if the financial apparatus is turned onto solving the huge problems we face, then more of those good things will happen. Potentially, way more. Are there going to be externalities produced by impact certificates that can’t be resolved by throwing more impact certificates at improving the impact certificate system and resolving those externalities? Likely. But if people have to sacrifice their resources in order to make things better, this is a poor way of incentivizing them to do so. The non-profit world is ready for disruption, and we expect impact certificates to cause more total altruism to happen.