Alice offers social funding through blockchain technology
by Startacus Admin
Blockchain for social good! London-based FinTech startup Alice is one of the world’s first companies to put Ethereum blockchain technology to practical use in the charity sector beyond simple cryptocurrency donations...
In 2013, the Guardian reported that UK charities are missing out on £665m in donations annually. Since then, public confidence in charities has plummeted, reaching its lowest point on record in 2016. This is a quiet crisis that puts real lives at risk and must be addressed before it is too late for the people these charities strive to help.
London-based FinTech(-for-good?) startup Alice is one of the world’s first companies to put Ethereum blockchain technology to practical use in the charity sector beyond .png "Alice blockchain social funding")
simple cryptocurrency donations. The way it works is to freeze donations to a charity until that charity can prove that they have achieved the goals set out and which attracted the donation in the first place. If they do not, the money is simply returned to the donors.
This money is paid in normal currency rather than cryptocurrencies, which are too volatile, a process made possible partly in partnership with the Financial Conduct Authority’s sandbox programme - which aims to foster innovation in the financial services industry - and with Tramonex Labs, a FinTech startup that issues e-money on the blockchain.
This methodology allows Alice and their partner charities to make the performance of charity projects public and fully auditable; ensure performance data is secure and extremely difficult to falsify or hack; and manage the conditional payment of donations based on charity performance.
The startup has been working with homelessness charity St Mungo’s in an appeal called Street Impact: 15 Lives, which is helping 15 people sleeping rough - and for whom traditional approaches and efforts to help them into housing have so far not worked - to put their lives back together. So far, over £13,000 has been raised towards this goal.
This pilot scheme with St Mungo’s is being run with funding from Nominet Trust’s Social Tech Seed programme, and we think that this helping hand will be all Alice needs to help prove how valuable they could be to rebuilding trust in charity.
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Published on: 15th September 2018
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