[Music]
hi everyone I'm I'm Rafael I'm the CEO
of Alice and this is Jacob who's our
huzzah CTO and we're here to talk today
about what we've built and how we're
helping the non crypto world comment
with areum using social impact yeah so
really briefly I'm going to give a quick
overview of where we are which is that
we've we've got a transparent donations
platform there's been live since May on
Alice dot si which is our website then
jacob is going to run you through how we
built that the hybrid model that we use
to bring mass audiences onto onto the
platform and then i'll just give you a
brief overview of the next steps for
alice beyond beyond donations so if you
know alice it's because you know
transparent donation platform and the
idea there is that you can give to a
social project you can see exactly what
impact your money makes and if it
doesn't make an impact then you get your
money back and the project that we have
live on the on the on the website right
now is a project run by a homelessness
charity called st. Mungo's and they are
helping fifteen rough sleepers in london
find accommodation and deal with mental
health issues substance abuse issues and
the way that it the the reason why we we
built this really is because in the last
few years there's been a loss of public
trust in the charity sector and the
charity sector has really starting to
see this as an existential threat
because without trust the level of
donations tends to tend to fall and so
that's why we built
is this this donation platform the way
that it works is that when you when you
go onto the onto the website you can
donate your donation gets held in escrow
which means it gets frozen basically in
a smart contract during that time the
charity can start running the project
and and started delivering the the goals
that it that it set out to achieve so it
lays out in in in the pilot st. Mungo's
has laid out a certain number of goals
and but it's only when the goals are
independently validated that the money
from the donations gets paid to the
charity and in this case it's the
Greater London Authority that the the
Mayor of London someone in the housing
team that reviews the proof so if that's
a rental agreement for example if
someone's find accommodation then they
will they will validate that and at the
same time the validation triggers a
notification to the donor so they know
exactly what their money has paid for to
know how the blockchain works
what's the blockchain all what is
necessary is to have a plane without any
plugin so there's no need for
complicated tools like a mist browser
and as the whole world mostly uses fiat
currency we do not want to force our
donors to change fiat into crypto get
through a crypto wallet and donate we
allow for a plain credit card donations
which is the most popular way to donate
let's see how it works out in the
practice so that's one of our first
donors actually it's my mom she's
she's 67 years old and she's not a
crypto geek at all she she stopped
casting Kappa the technology in the late
eighties when the video tape recorder
was released but she know how to use
Internet she know how to write an email
check the weather and recently she was
able to put three transactions on the
main interview blog train using our
Ally's platform how was it possible
so whenever user registers an account on
our platform we on the user behalf
create a YouTube account which is
safeguarded by a password so every
interaction every transaction need to be
signed by our entering the password we
also perform via tokenization so when we
accept the money
there are stable stable coins issued
that are pegged one to one to the
original value and the full reserve is
keep aside and we're happy to say that
earlier this year we took a part in two
regulatory sandbox provided by financial
conduct authority which is a UK
regulatory body and to our knowledge
were the first company to use fully
regulated digital Pound Sterling
provided by trauma lexlabs and from a
user perspective the transaction is
recorded after he clicks on donate
button and then we use and I synchronous
relay just to further process the
transaction and put it on a blockchain
and this solution proven to be quite
useful because roughly a month after we
launched we noticed some strange
behavior in the relay so there was
severe delays and a lot of retrials
and she was a day 25 June when there was
an status ICO so from the point of view
of our donors nothing changed at all
they were able to submit donations and
we process it as synchronously and they
were eventually recorded on the
blockchain and to be honest were first
scared before we started the pilot
because we are all about trust and
transparency so even if we miss manage a
single transaction that would be
disaster for the whole idea that's why
we are using a triple registration
system so we register donation on a
virtual wallet provided by a payment
provider we register on our classic
database and we obviously register it
further on the blockchain
currently we have a hybrid model but we
want to go for fully decentralized and
trustless solution but along the way we
want to take small steps not to
sacrifice the usability and safety for
the donors the next step for us was to
implement something that we call the
geek mode it's a section on our platform
when the user can browse and explore all
of the transactions that will mate with
his interactions and for users who has a
plugin that allows to connect to blog
train like a web tree connector we got a
very simple table
but with a restricted read-only access
that you allowed to check a balance and
what goals were achieved by these users
and before we allow our donors to enter
the Wild West of the blockchain we want
to equip them with safety features like
one of that is a donation wallet so all
of the transfers outside of the world
cannot be can be directed only to
authorized verified projects because we
want to shield the users against scam
attacks so if they receive offer to
donate via slack channel or email from
an untrusted account they will be unable
to process and donation wallet also
offers a way to recover if the password
was too lost so we can set up a multi
seek recover procedure so in a case that
you lost a password this you are still
able to set up a connection to a new
account
we also focus on the security of the
phones that we are collecting so the
other extra features for our Treasury
like a two-phase transfers when they
need to be initiated by data later on
the transfers can be time locked we also
introduced a special rollover
whistleblowers that may raise an alarm
if the transfer looks suspicious but
without any acting power because acting
powers in the hands of a curator maybe
we found the transfer we also use
classic features like posing or freezing
the treasure reconstruct and escape
hatches in an emergency and as the
project in practice has evolved engine
iterating and if a charity cannot
achieve all of the goals it is possible
that charity submit a proposal update
that is later on voted by donors and
beneficiaries and leave that cost is
valid the configuration of the project
may be change we built an abstract layer
around our data so we tokenized that
in the form that we store meta
information about who was the author of
the data at what are the access right
and the full evidence is kept in the off
train and cryptid database that is
synchronized notarized on the blockchain
why do we need such a structure for our
data I would refer to explain yeah so
this has to do with the the broader
vision of Alice which actually goes
beyond donations and obviously
transparency is really important for
small donors because they're they're
losing trust in in charities but it's
actually also important for a whole host
of other social impact actors for
example big philanthropic trusts and
foundations and they are increasingly
giving grants based on evidence so it's
very important to measure that
governments in the UK the US Europe and
increasingly other countries shifting
also their grants to payment for success
models where they only pay when when
outcomes social outcomes have been
achieved and
over the last 10 years or so there's
been a real rise in an alternative
source of funding in the form of impact
investment so what impact investors do
is when they invest obviously they
they're looking for a financial return
but they're also looking for a social or
environmental return which means that
it's really important for them to track
that data and the big problem is that
unfortunately when it comes to impact
data we're still in prehistoric times
everybody is systematically reinventing
the wheel
everybody is measuring things quite
differently the standards that exist
aren't really aren't really widespread
and really importantly all of that data
tends to get stuck in the individual
databases of all of these organizations
so it makes it really difficult to
access and compare and benchmark
projects to see which ones are the are
the most effective so we are going to
build three main evolutions on on the
Allis Network the first one is really
starting to break down what goes in that
impact data so we're going to require
that that social organisations break
down their projects across five
dimensions those five dimensions have
been developed by the impact management
project with who we we're collaborating
it's a big open source research project
that's
amongst over 700 practitioners all
around the world to to build a framework
for how to to measure manage impact and
effectively the projects will be tagged
across those five dimensions and we're
also going to require social
organizations and projects to produce
regular progress reports against
internal performance indicators and the
way that we're going to enforce that is
that they will be rewarded they'll get
paid for for submitting those those
reports and if they don't submit them on
time so for example then they will be
punished with all further payments
withheld until they do and that payment
for reporting is actually also at the
core of what of what we do because what
we what we're going for is not making
impact projects cheap but effective so
you're probably familiar with this kind
of pie chart that social organizations
produce showing exactly how much money
goes to admin how much money goes to PR
or fundraising how much gets to the
frontline and actually we don't think
that that's the most important thing at
all because it doesn't really tell you
anything about how effective they are
what we prefer to focus on is tracking
the impact so how many people have been
helped is this social project actually
improving the lives of the of the people
that it serves so we're not tracking the
money we're tracking the impact the
second major evolution to the network is
that we are going to incentivize users
to take all of that impact data that's
been produced by your projects across
the network and crunch that data so that
you can really surface the most
effective projects so that funders can
can help scale them and we're also going
to build prediction markets that allow
users to bet on whether the the proposed
changes to projects that are submitted
in the in the regular progress reports
for example are likely to increase or
decrease the impact of of those projects
and the idea there is to crowdsource the
expertise of people across the network
to really help charities learn for
from each other and iterate their
projects to really make them as
effective as possible and finally what
we are going to build is another payment
module that's focused on impact
investment because what we have right
now is that donors give to give to the
the social projects that those funds are
held in escrow and they're only paid out
when the goals are validated now the
problem there is if especially if you're
a smaller charity you might not have the
financial resources to run your project
before getting the money so that's where
the impact investors come in they will
provide some working capital some seed
capital that they will give to the to
the to the project so they can start
running them effectively what they'll be
doing is underwriting the risk so if the
project never produces any results if it
never achieves its goals the investors
will lose their money but if it does
achieve its goals and it gets paid from
from the donations in escrow then part
of those donations will go to reimburse
that investment so that's that's pretty
much it that's the that's the broader
vision we're building a fully integrated
decentralized social impact ecosystem so
that social organizations can tap into
donations and grants and impact
investment so that they're their impact
is properly managed and transparent and
accessible supported by validation
market so they can easily choose
validators for their projects whether
those are human validators or Oracle's
and by knowledge sharing markets that
help crunch that data and surface the
the most effective projects and that's
really what we're all about is really
identifying the best projects helping
them scale and cutting transaction costs
across across the network now we've just
published a white paper today just a few
hours ago so we invite everybody to go
onto our website and read that it covers
everything that we've just that we've
just explained in in a lot more detail
as well as some some some really
interesting stuff that we that we're
building as well that you'll that you'll
be able to read about on the on the
like paper like a decentralized fund to
help to help smaller organizations
really design and and run their projects
transparently on the network thank you
very much if you have any questions over
here please question sorry over here
hello this is quite a tedious little
question actually um just the matter of
issuing receipts to donors I've always
found that to be just a real pain in the
backside but if it particular if it
comes via a bank account so does your
module have what what do you do by way
of how do you issue receipts to your
mother when she's paid her donation so
that's that's something that that we
actually spent a lot of time on
currently the platform can be used only
in the in the UK and we went through all
the regulatory hoops to make sure that
that people could get receipts when they
donate they can actually apply Gift Aid
if you know how that works in the UK
it's a way of gifting the taxes to the
to the charities and we had to get the
the regulatory the regulatory
authorizations to do that it gets
applied when the donations come out of
the of the escrow because you can't claw
it back afterwards and but then
obviously as we expand to different
countries we'll have to we'll have to
figure that out on a case-by-case
hi sorry to be a little more critical
and harsh on you but how I saw the
presentation is more like you're doing
charity I see oh instead of actual
actually empowering civil society to
perform social causes and it looks to me
that like you're commercializing civil
society actions which I think it's a
quite a slippery slope from civil
society point of view and I also want to
point out that like not far from UK
three hours flight from there in Romania
there are only six or seven percent of
people buying online so you also have to
take this into account that other
countries are not so used to paying
online and this transaction is not going
to have that peak of adoption rate and
also in terms of terminology when you
say the nation it traditionally points
to a gift you're giving money to someone
or just to an entity and you do not
necessarily ask for something in return
well in this model you ask for
performance so I would suggest turning a
little bit this terms around because
donations are gifts and this is not what
you're doing in this model so just on
the on the first bit on the
commercialization I didn't quite get
where you see the commercialization of
charity death when when you when you put
a high pressure on different activities
performed by a civil society for
receiving that type of money right but
so it's not so much commercialization as
just tracking the the impact so I think
all of the your your points
absolutely valid I think the reality is
that the lack of trust or the decline in
trust is very real and unfortunately
what happens is that then people get
completely obsessed in this really toxic
debate around how people spend their
money and that's what I was referring to
before how much goes to admin how much
goes to fundraising and that for me is
actually completely counterproductive
because it leads it leads to charities
trying to be as lean as possible they
end up under investing they can't pay
high quality people to run projects and
so that's why we track the data so and
the performance the way that we mitigate
what you're saying that's where we bring
in the impact investors it's also we're
going to implement some models where not
all of the money gets paid when the
impact is achieved so you could have a
model where half of your donations get
paid to the charity upfront and then
half of the half of the payment gets
paid upon achieving the results but
really what it is is just an incentive
mechanism to make sure that the the the
social organizations deliver on on the
impact that they that they promised
essentially and restore that trust and
ultimately what we want to do is just
help them raise a lot more money than
they are raising at the moment so they
can really tackle social and
environmental problems at scale and I
think on the on the last on the last
point or the second point that you made
which was a lot of people don't donate
online that's true but you know what a
lot less people even donating crypto so
that's why we're adopting a hybrid model
it has to be online for the incentive
mechanisms to work and hopefully as as
online giving becomes more widespread
then they'll be able to spread it out to
a lot more to a lot more countries and
donors I hope that answers your
questions
[Applause]
[Music]