Today, over 600 million people live in countries where the average daily income is less $3.10 a person. For comparison, someone in the US working at minimum wage would earn that amount more than 18 times a day. Not only does this illustrate nearly unbelievable inequality across different countries, but this income discrepancy also represents perhaps the greatest opportunity for economic growth in the 21st century. Even increasing the average daily income to $10 a day across the world would grow the global economy by $6.6 trillion a year.

Topl exists to help enable this growth.

At Topl, we’re working to build the financial infrastructure necessary to power growth around the world. We believe that a key barrier to economic — and therefore income — growth across the developing world is a shortage of well-placed investment in young and vibrant new enterprises. Right now, there are large amounts of excess capital held by investors in wealthy countries that has for years been seeking access to improved returns. While their enormous potential for broad-based economic growth should make developing countries more than attractive enough to garner sufficient capital, such investment has for the most part failed to materialize. Why is this?

Foreign individuals and funds have been largely cut out of investing in the young, innovative enterprises, best positioned to provide the highest returns, both for their investors and the wider economy.

Being left access only with microfinance — which often fails to produce a sustained impact — and index funds or ETFs that cover the entire developing market, investors have been denied the ability to directly support the best opportunities in these countries. It is this problem that Topl is working to solve by building the first global investment protocol. The Topl investment protocol enables investors to easily identify and vet opportunities and to safely invest outside of their own domestic markets.

While more details are available in our whitepaper, here’s a brief overview of the some of the aspects of the Topl protocol:

The blockchain network

The decision to build a blockchain network stems from Topl’s needs for decentralization and for reliability and high-fidelity information. This need for the Topl protocol to operate over a decentralized blockchain network has two underlying motivations: first, to ensure that we are not reliant on or constrained by any single national jurisdiction; and second, to remove any single potential point of failure or control.

Divine

Due diligence is a key part of any investment process and is even more important for investors looking at foreign targets. To help investors better assess the risk profile of any potential investment in the Topl ecosystem, we’ve created Divine, the first reputation system designed for use in developing capital markets. Divine derives its strength as a tool for risk assessment through its combined use of both direct historical outcomes and prediction markets.

Polys

The Poly is the value-stable cryptocurrency of the Topl system. Backed by a basket commodities and utilities, Polys provide a stable store of value and unit of account for investors using the Topl protocol anywhere in the world. Additionally, because it’s free from the artificial exchange rates common in developing economies, the Poly can easily move across borders, without the loses caused by price-fixed markets.