January 1, 2030 @ 6:23 am
This is a very important journal entry for me. As with every new year, I recap the past & plan for the future. But with the 2020’s behind us, I feel like I need to reflect on how much life has changed in the past decade.
Three big things stick out to me:
Let’s recap from the beginning:
The Covid pandemic started in 2020. When the economy started shutting down and people were losing their jobs, I decided it was time to help. Since I was already working on Citizen Health, I felt compelled to offer my services to public health. We pivoted our work to build COVIDx, a platform that crowdsourced wearable data, citizen reports, & testing results to help governments & hospitals make better decisions. We had over 175 volunteers work on this social good project. Unfortunately, the coronavirus moved faster than us, and we didn’t make the impact we hoped for. Looking back, this was the impetus for Citizen DAO.
We just moved back to Collin’s hometown for her new job right when the pandemic was raging. I was blessed to be able to work remotely and spend time volunteering. It was great at first. I could sit around in my sweatpants and workout when I wanted. The house got crazy with 3 kids under 5, but thankfully our parents helped me out and took the kiddos during the day so I could get some deep work time. Me and Collin butted heads during this period. For starters, she was frustrated because I didn’t have a “job” in the regular sense. She thought all I did everyday was watch YouTube videos and read books. Ha! I remember trying to explain crypto multiple times…Totally backfired when I showed her my NFT collection. I think she’s okay with it now ;-) But then she was stressed with her new job as the Patient Care Coordinator for L&D, and rightfully so. That was a hard time to work through, and I’m proud of her.
Anyways, this is when Web3 really took off. I entered the crypto space in 2010, so I was a part of all the cycles. My "light bulb" moment was in 2016 when I finally understood the potential of blockchain technology. Once you see it, you can't unsee it. By 2020, I was convinced that “programmable money” would solve core societal problems and advance humanity in giant leaps. In addition to the pact me and Grant made when he was 3 days old, I decided to go all in with Web3 and use money as a tool for good. Personally, I wanted to build the Star Trek economy 😎
This is around the time that my crypto investments started to take off in a big way. My stake in Olympus turned out to be the second best investment I made during that period. That initial $10k investment for 24 OHM turned into $10M in about 2 years. I remember how freaked out I was watching my portfolio growing $100k+ a week at one point. I didn’t tell anyone other than my parents & my wife, but I sold $1M to buy 120 acres & build a house. Well, technically I used ETH as collateral to borrow $1M via Alchemix the same way I did to buy Collin's car. That loan automagically repaid itself last year. I stopped using banks at this point and became my own bank. The bull run of 2022-24 melted faces. Fun times.
Since I had made a few bucks from crypto, I was really feeling the need to donate somewhere. However, I was skeptical about charities because I knew how much administrative bloat they had based on my previous work for a foundation. While researching the most effective charities, I read Doing Good Better by William MacAskill, which led me to the concept of “Effective Altruism.” I finally had a mental model to describe how I felt about giving. In hindsight, this was the second impetus for Citizen DAO.
Alright, so about Citizen DAO. We “upgraded” Citizen Health to Citizen DAO when we became the first legal DAO LLC in Wyoming July 1, 2021.
From there, we went straight into building mode and focused on the root causes of humanity’s problems. Using the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals as a guide, we set out to make the world a better place. The first project we decided on was a way to use programmable money to fund public benefits via Social Impact Bonds.
We started building the “Impact Protocol” during the 2021 Fall Chainlink Hackathon. The next year took us all for a wild ride. While Citizen DAO quickly got much bigger than our original core team, I’ll stick to the first Social Impact Bond projects that changed my life. Here’s how it went down:
The first success we had with $Housing bonds was building houses in Guatemala. We were able to raise $10M to build 1,000 houses during 2022 for families living in dirt floor shacks. Since my kids we’re all under 5, I had a soft spot in my heart for the kids & families we were helping in Guatemala.
Going from a damp, dirt floor shack to a dry, well ventilated, cement floor home made big improvements for Guatemalan families. We reduced childhood diarrhea by 70%, reduced anemia by 90%, and improved cognitive development by 128%.
This was my first $Housing bond:
In the early days, we built new home packages for $10,000 USD. This included the Lamina Pop construction with cement floors, Tesla Solar & Starlink for power & internet (huge partnership there!), Spartan Mosquito for killing skeeters, eye glasses, and basic health kits. We aimed to improve the physical, mental, & financial health of these families, and we did just that. I'll never forget the World Bank research paper we used for reference:
The biggest gain that we still haven’t realized yet is from the improvement in childhood cognition. Once these kids stopped having parasitic infections, they gained weight, got happier, and got smarter. Coupled with a laptop & internet from Starlink, we empowered 10,000+ children to join Web3 and increased their family income by 5,000%!
This was a fun one! What started off as a meme blew up and took on a life of its own. Remember the “Save the Whales” campaign back in the day? Inspired by the documentary How to Change The World, we took a page from their playbook and started a “Save the Apes” campaign, then merged it with the old “Buy a War Bond” tactics various countries used during the world wars. The whole thing was a playful meme that just worked.
We used $Climate bond revenue to buy, hold, & protect rainforests around the world. After forests, we started protecting water. As of 2030, Citizen DAO protects around 2.4 billion acres of beautiful forests & oceans around the world. A super cool part of this was the VR app we built to visit these nature preserves 24/7.
Some early graphics we used:
Along with buying & protecting land, we turned these areas into wildlife preserves for endangered species, specifically apes. The marketing behind this was perfect timing since the core crypto community joked about being “degen apes” in new NFT & DeFi projects. We just fueled the fire.
Instead of buying random cartoon ape jpegs, we started buying actual apes. Well, not buying them per se, but “adopting” them so they don’t die & go extinct. I remember my first chimp, George, which Grant & Greer named. His mom got killed by some poachers in the Congo. He was 5 months old when we adopted the little fellow! Here’s a picture of George we used on a Twitter post:
We also had massive success with the $Health bonds around this time. Well, the entire Impact Bond market was a massive success, but these were the areas I had the biggest impact in, especially building the Citizen Health Fund.
Our first $Health bond project was Moxi, the global DeFi protocol for health & wellness. Programmable money eliminated the need for health insurance entirely, so we got creative. Instead of treating healthcare as a liability & expense, we turned health into an asset & investment.
This was one of the first screenshots I took of Moxi:
The big game changer was ….. ah, sounds like Grant just woke up and is headed down. My fav time of the day with my bud :-)
To be continued...
