The author, Dr. Nicholas Adams Judge, is a cofounder of RootProject. The other cofounder is Chris Place, a Y Combinator alum. Their nonprofit’s pre-ICO just passed 162% of its goal and is open until July 28th, 2017. An easy way to understand their model is here.

Today we hit our pre-ICO goal, despite ether’s price drop. We’re going to prove out a model: A cryptocurrency, designed correctly and in conjunction with a nonprofit institution, lets value be created for investors even when the underlying service or product comes from non profit-seeking behavior.

In our case, that’s a crowdfunding-powered nonprofit to help homeless and near-homeless people get back on their feet. You can learn more here.

But the bigger picture is building a world where the underlying economics of institution-building are the same whether you’re pursuing profitable or not-for-profit goals.

That’s the end game. Ambitious enough for you? Want to help?

Alex Bazhanau

Today we’re proud to announce our first hire: Alex Bazhanau. Alex recently finished his MS in computer science, with a thesis in which he developed a DAPP for electronic voting at universities. The hiring decision was a no-brainer. He’s been and will be helping us with the early stages of smart contract design and a number of other crucial tasks.

We’ll be putting up our Github page in the next 24 hours and will be pushing lots of exciting code there. We’ve had a number of developers reach out to us. If you’d like to lend a hand and build code that will straight up save people’s lives, join our Slack team, and DM Anton or I.

— Before I get heat for sounding too much like a techie cofounder overhyping things, let me clarify: I’m talking about directly saving people’s lives. As in saving them from freezing to death on the street by the time 2018’s winter comes around.

We announced our pre-ICO ten days ago, and began last Monday. Guided by Chris’ Y Combinator experience (launch now, launch now, launch now! iterate.) and knowing from conversation that people responded well to the idea and whitepaper — and since I’d already written a decent chunk of the MVP’s code — we decided to launch and see what would happen.

Our best hopes about the crypto community have come to pass.

We met Anton, who has been trading cryptocurrencies since 2012 and has come on as our Director of Development from when we put out a draft of our whitepaper. He’s been putting in 100 hour weeks for a while now. Our hats are off to him.

Our Slack team passed 700 people today. A level of work and self-organization that I’ve never personally seen on this scale before.

We hope you’ll help!

Chris and Nick, the cofounders, are taking not a dime of their token or any compensation beyond a reasonable salary. Other employees get, in total, 10% of the token vested out over many years, only if it doesn’t interfere with RootProject’s ability to operate as a nonprofit. This is done to align management and investor interests.