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 initial goal, and the dates for their ICO will be announced in January. The founders are taking zero tokens and no compensation beyond a reasonable salary.

MVP

RootProject’s pre-ICO ended about a month ago. Since then, behind the scenes, we’ve been hard at work on the MVP and preparing for the ICO.

It’s time to start the public campaign. Here’s our first move: On our timeline, we stated our MVP would be deployed within 45 days of the ICO. We chose that date because we’re cautious developers, knowing the unforeseen problems that typically come up. The team has been working together exceptionally efficiently, however. After a lot of late nights and early mornings, we’re rolling out the MVP next week, before the ICO begins.

The MVP is a beautiful crowdfunding web app — obviously I’m biased, but next week, you’ll see our front end. For the launch, we’ve lined up several major national American charities. They’ve each chosen to use our web app to launch crowdfunding campaigns. In the long run, most of the crowdfunded projects’ work will be implemented by RootProject itself, sourcing labor from undersheltered and at-risk communities. But, per our whitepaper, in the early stages, we will partner with established groups so we can scale quickly.

We’ll roll out the particular projects individually next week. But for now, we’ll be partnering with nonprofits that have preexisting on-the-ground capacity. Together, we’ll raise funds for kids at risk of homelessness; teens who have been without shelter; the fight against the opioid crisis; and other extremely important, pressing causes.

Tech Goes Home has partnered with RootProject in one of the pilot crowdfunding campaigns.

The first week of September is the week when RootProejct, after all this work, starts to truly help people.

Start Date

We’re keeping the ICO end date the same, the 6th of October, 2017. But we’re changing the ICO start date to the 26th of September. Our experience from the pre-ICO showed us two things. First, as the thousand-plus people with us from the bounty campaign in the early days know, we started the pre-ICO too early. We ended up doing really well, but that was because of support from the crypto community, not because of the leadership’s strategic thinking about start dates. Second, the majority of support for an ICO comes from its first few days and its last day.

Keeping an ICO open for a month isn’t necessary. So, we’ll keep the same end date, so investors will still get their tokens at the promised time. But we’ll push the start date until after everyone has gotten to see our MVP in action.

(Note that you may have to clear your cache to see the changed clock date on RootProject.co)

ICO Reservation System

Lastly, Alex finished the reservation smart contract, and we just launched that. Now you can reserve your spot for the ICO and get reservation tokens that will be converted into ROOTS tokens after the ICO.

As a side note, Alex has been working on both our campaign and Monetha’s, which just raised more than $30 million in one day. A hearty congrats to the Monetha guys. We settled on a partnership with them a few weeks ago, and are very excited to be launching our MVP and announcing the specifics of that partnerhsip soon. They are smart guys and their token is a very smart purchase, in our opinion.

Future Announcements

We’ve got a lot more coming. Major hires, advisors and big announcements. But the above is momentous enough for now. Anton and I are on a plane to Seoul in the next few days. We’re excited to be taking RootProject to one of the most important, impressive hubs of crypto.

Disclaimer: Financial investment is risky. Investments in crypto assets are particularly risky. Do not invest with any funds you are not willing to lose.