RootProject’s SAFT I and Strategic Token Purchaser rounds have been filled, their tokens allocated to leading VCs and token purchasers on several continents — and of course some sold to our telegram group.

Two groups even asked to take the entirety of the ICO — public & private sales. (We said no to both, because that level of token concentration would harm future market support.)

RootProject is building a decentralized ecosystem that links communities and helps nonprofits. That construction isn’t guided by feelings and hope, but by decades of empirical economic and social scientific literature. Interested in how? Read our business plan.

The precedent we’re building along the way is perhaps more powerful than the work we’re doing. For decades, the nonprofit industry — the third largest sector of the US economy by employment — has been searching for a way to fund itself. Industry publications like Nonprofit Quarterly have long documented attempts at financial innovation that would allow supporters to see a return on their money.

The goal of nonprofit financial innovation isn’t that complex: If you can correlate an asset with a nonprofit’s size and efficacy, you can put the full power of markets and investors behind true nonprofit behavior.

What has held that goal up also isn’t complex: Exotic financial instruments are expensive to build and expensive to evaluate. That priciness prevents the creation of liquid secondary markets. It’s the singular pain point of the nonprofit industry.

Crypto removes those problems. Full stop.

RootProject is the first project to recognize this and to put a plan into action to prove the model out.

How you correlate a crypto asset and a related institution is a domain-specific question. But the mechanisms always are the same: Simple, credible institutional rules that link an institution’s size and efficacy with the supply and demand of the asset.

RootProject is not a plan to marginally increase nonprofit efficiency. It’s a model built to put the full power of markets and investors behind nonprofits.

Pull that off and it is a fundamental leveling of the playing field between the pursuit of financial profit and social good. The precedent RootProject’s success will set will lead to fundamental change in nonprofit funding.

The author, Dr. Nicholas Adams Judge, is a political economist and cofounder of the nonprofit RootProject. The other cofounder, Chris Place, is a Y Combinator Fellow. Their pre-ICO achieved 512% of its goal.