The WeTrust Charity Circle

Here at WeTrust, we believe that the blockchain can be used for social good. As a demonstration of our commitment to that mission, we recently organized a Trusted Charity Circle (inspired by Trusted Lending Circles) on the WeTrust platform. Here’s how it works:

During each week of the Charity Circle, each member will contribute 5 Ether into the pool

One member of the group will be selected at random as the winner of the Ether pool each week, with no member winning the pot more than once

The recipient of the funds for that week then donates the proceeds to a charity of their choice

Over the course of the 5 week period, every week each person ends up contributing 25 Ether to the charity of their choice

The purpose of taking these actions above, is to demonstrate for the first time that the WeTrust platform is capable of supporting similar use cases where participants collaborate transparently as a group in a financial endeavor, contributes tokens, and receives tokens distributed back to them over time, without the need for a trusted third party. One can imagine all the new ways application developers will use these improved capabilities to build decentralized applications.

We’re very lucky to have some major movers and shakers in the blockchain world generously agreeing to participate in our Trusted Charity Circle.

Emin Gun Sirer

Emin Gün Sirer is an Associate Professor at Cornell University, where he is Co-Director of the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Contracts (IC3). His research spans operating systems, networking, and distributed systems. In 2002, he started Karma, an early cryptocurrency that was the first to utilize a proof-of-work concept. He also acts as the Blockchain Advisor for the WeTrust project. He is an outspoken member of the hacker community, and runs a technology blog called Hacking Distributed that questions current practices.

David Johnston

David serves as the Chairman of the Board of Factom, and as Director of the Dapps Venture Fund, the first fund to invest entirely in open-source, blockchain and token-based projects. He also co-founded and served as Executive Director of BitAngels in 2013, one of the world’s largest angel investment groups.

Matthew Roszak

Matthew is a co-founder and chairman of Bloq, a blockchain enterprise software company. Mr. Roszak is also founding partner of Tally Capital, a private investment firm focused on blockchain-enabled technology with a portfolio of over 20 investments. He has spent over 20 years in private equity and venture capital with Advent International, Keystone Capital Partners, Platinum Venture Partners and SilkRoad Equity. He also serves as chairman of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, the world’s largest trade association representing the blockchain industry.

Jeremy Gardner

Jeremy is the Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Blockchain Capital. He recently cofounded a stealth blockchain startup focused on legacy database security and auditing for governments and healthcare. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Distributed, a semi-annual print blockchain technology primer, and Chairman of the Blockchain Education Network, a global educational nonprofit. Gardner previously cofounded Augur, the decentralized prediction market platform on Ethereum.

George Li (organizer of the Charity Circle)

George is a co-founder of WeTrust, where he leads Product Management efforts. He will serve as the foreperson in this Charity Circle. He previously held roles in Corporate Strategy at Google and has worked at McKinsey as a consultant.

Thanks to all those who are participating, and follow the WeTrust blog to see how these blockchain experts use the decentralized technology they are passionate about to achieve social good!