Acorn’s full revised whitepaper is now live! It gives a comprehensive and detailed explanation of our updated proposition, and how we’re are going to change crowdfunding globally.

We know that you may need a little longer to read the full document, so we thought we’d pull out some of the main highlights to give you an insight into our next generation crowdfunding platform.

Don’t forget, our main sale goes live on Saturday 26th of May, so make sure you sign up to our mailing list to be first in line for KYC!.

INCREASING ACCESS

1. NO FEES TO HOST CAMPAIGNS

“A basic crowdfunding campaign is free — in contrast to all other current platforms known to us, we intend to keep crowdfunding itself completely free on our platform. A standard project that does not opt-in to use our advanced tools or custom audiences should not pay anything in platform fees.”

2. LOW UPFRONT CAPITAL REQUIREMENTS

“Our project criteria means seed capital requirements should be minimal, thus drastically lowering one of the biggest barriers to entry. Fees for advanced tools or custom audiences are paid as a percentage of raise, without upfront costs. Lastly, early milestones may be implemented to access funds before the raise campaign is concluded, subject to approval by the backer community of that project”.

PROMOTING SUCCESS

3. ACORN’S DATA LAKE

“By bringing together all user actions performed within the Acorn ecosystem, from onboarding, marketing tools, marketplace services, transactions, backer behaviours and community interactions, we intend to build the largest available bank of crowdfunding data. This can then be effectively applied to future campaigns, giving founders proven guidance in the form of “Stats of Success” and the ability to target the right backers via “Tailored Audiences”. We believe the impact on project success rates can be immense.”

4. A GAMIFIED PLATFORM

“We intend to apply gamification heavily, to encourage user activity and community involvement. For example, founders could level up and earn badges and rewards following campaign best practices, by interacting with their backer community and concluding a project successfully. Similarly, backers would earn extra points for supporting a project, providing feedback or participating in community votes”

5. A TOOL BOX FOR ALL FOUNDERS

“It is the intention to create a tool box, which every founder will have access to, including software and hardware tools that they may wish to use for their campaign. The purpose of this is to ensure that founders are set up with all the essential tools they need to run a successful campaign. Tools will be recommended to them based on what has worked for past similar campaigns. The aim is for this to be made up of featured tools, white labeled tools and a free basic toolkit.”

6. ACORN’S SUCCESS SHOP

“Bridging the gap between building a product vs building a business. We aim to give successful projects the ability to list their product on the Acorn Success Shop, immediately placing in front of consumers who have already expressed an interest in crowdfunding, backing projects and may even own OAK tokens already.”

TRANSPARENCY

7. OPTIONAL MILESTONES TO INCREASE TRUST

“ Implementing milestones, which will remain optional, would allow founders to show a clear and logical plan of achieving project delivery, whilst demonstrating their sincerity to backers. We believe backers will be more willing to support a project that shows well planned milestones, and a sincere founder, as well as the safety of receiving at least a partial refund, should a project fail before all milestones are achieved. Verification may be done in multiple ways, but will likely be a combination of social trust, documents, manual verification by local partners and platform moderators, as well as smart contracts.”

8. ACTIVITY TRANSPARENCY LEDGER

“We envision this to provide the major foundation of transparency for backers. From start to finish, the Activity Transparency Ledger would record all ecosystem actions taken by the founder. Subject to the successful implementation of our Acorn Payment Gateway, external fiat spending will also be recorded on the ledger. The founder can then choose to make all actions publicly viewable. We believe the resultant full transparency would materially improve trust in the project, considerably lowering backers’ objection to pledge funds.”

For more information take a look at our full whitepaper.