Every time the Giveth Slack gets a new user, a unicorn is born. Let’s change the world: http://slack.giveth.io/

Giveth is an open source smart contract platform taking charitable donations to the next level! This platform enables transparency and accountability for P2P donations, and aims to build communities around changing the world for the better!

The Giveth Core Team hopes that one day soon, charities, non-profits and open source development projects will be using Giveth’s smart contracts and UIs to fund powerful projects that can bring REAL change.

The system of charitable donations we have today is ready for a massive evolution. Bitcoin made a major step forward, allowing money to be sent directly to those in need, Giveth adds Ethereum-based smart contracts to kick it up a notch ;-)!

Giveth’s main purpose is to build effective decentralized communities that desire to change the world. Our smart contracts help them align incentives properly to simply reward good people for doing good work in a frictionless, transparent way.

This Ted Talk helps us understand the state of charitable donations today, but it is overlooking the biggest problem of misaligned incentives. Is a giant non-profit funding disease research incentivized to find a cure if that will kill their revenue streams leading to 95% of their employees getting laid off?

There are great people in the charity space working hard to make the world a better place, but the systems they have to work within today are inefficient in many ways. We believe we can make them much more effective.

The Giveth Solution

Build a result-based incentive structure that distributes donations after milestones have been reached. Decentralize all the things! Empower anyone looking to make the world a better place a way to raise funds for their idea and build a community. Giveth puts individuals and large charitable organizations on an equal playing field; letting their ideas compete! Build communities by opening a communication channel directly between the donors and the recipients of the donations to maximize transparency (I am sitting next to Carl and Jarrad from Status.im right now, oh it’s so happening ;-) ) .

To keep this short introduction on point, I want to illustrate just 3 of Giveth’s core values:

Keeping Incentives Aligned

Current expectations for donation management are too low, donations are given and the donors just have to hope results will follow. No transparency; no accountability. Giveth allows communities to choose another way. Its open source system enables transparency, accountability, and efficiency. Donors, using the Giveth platform, can send donations directly to the campaigns that are providing solutions (no middlemen, only Solidity code). These donations will be collected by campaigns upon the completion of pre-arranged milestones creating a result-focused incentive structure. Additionally, successful campaign’s methods will be public for the world to see, so that campaigns that were especially effective can be scaled globally.

Open Source Collaboration

We are not alone in wanting to improve charitable giving. We are working in strong collaboration with Christoph Jentzsch’s Charity DAO and Alice.si and have opened communication channels with many other digital currency based charity solution makers. One of them being BitGive, who’s recently launched their GiveTrack tool! This exemplifies the type of transparency that will be standard in the charity world. We all have the same goal: making donations more transparent and more effective, and we hope to create somewhat of a coalition with others that are aligned in this mission.

BitGive is really doing amazing work!

On top of that the core Giveth team is committed to completely open source development and will bend over backwards to make it as easy as possible for other developers to use EVERYTHING we build for our platform in their own projects, whether they are charities, non-profit, or for-profit! Every smart contract and user interface we create, is a gift to the Ethereum ecosystem that we will go out of our way document and share with the rest of the community.

Leading by Example

The Giveth Core Team is committed to using the Giveth platform to sustain our own development #dogfooding. We firmly believe using our result-based incentive structure will help us improve the Giveth platform much more quickly than if we take donations the old way, or if we try to start an vanilla company to fund development. Every wei that is given to Giveth is put into our smart contract platform and distributed using our Vault , recording every payment on the blockchain and incentivizing us to accomplish goals.

Why the soft launch?

Giveth’s foundational set of smart contracts are Live on the Ethereum blockchain!

We are using several open source Solidity contracts designed by Jordi Baylina to manage our own donations transparently on the blockchain. Even though the Giveth Platform will officially exit stealth mode in late January at the Blockchain-Expo in London, Jordi has been hard at work and is ahead of schedule and we will never let the silly PR game slow down real open source development!

We have been testing the MiniMe Token extensively and feel it is ready for Prime Time, if you find yourself needing to launch or upgrade a token, consider the only token contract that allows your DApp to be upgradeable midstream in a decentralized manner!

We are using our own token to support the development of our platform. Anyone who donates to Giveth by sending ether to 0xf19c536ab792f173b7ee62d9ccc51f4ed6180773 will receive Giveth Tokens! (Note from kingflurkel: You need to set a gas limit of 150,000 gas or more when donating to Giveth Campaigns.) Giveth tokens are not intended to have monetary value, but they will be used for the governance of the Giveth platform as future contracts are developed to enable this functionality.

The Giveth Vault Contract

Giveth is very excited to release it’s second contract out into the wild for peer review! The Vault Contract is one of the most important contracts in our system, it is meant to safely store ether and to automate and record payments transparently on the Ethereum blockchain. The Vault contract is introduced in this post, and feel free to dive into our code and use it for your own DApp!

It’s time to start building the Giveth Community! Join us on Slack, dive into our Github Repos, and let’s get this party started!