A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend a workshop by a group that is building a "positive impact and philanthropic currency". Among the models used as examples were United MileagePlus and Bitcoin.

As soon as the discussion went to Bitcoin, one of the attendees said "Crypto is a scam" and used some vague examples of why/how. Turns out she had never heard of Ethereum nor had much understanding of why Bitcoin is valuable or how either of the two very different crypto currencies, smart contracts, and assets function. It was a general catch-all phrase used to bucket a multi-trillion dollar industry into simplistic good v. bad framing.

Several other attendees immediately, and quite politely, asked questions as to why this conclusion was drawn and provided evidence of why this was not the case.

One example was Chris Dixon's book, Read Write Own: Building the Next Era of the Internet, which presents a comprehensive vision for the future of the internet, emphasizing the role of blockchain technology in overcoming the current limitations and centralization of the web. Many refer to this historic moment in time as the "Internet of Value", where value can be exchanged as easily as information.

I could have brought up dozens of examples re why crypto is not a scam and the positive things that being onchain enables like RWA x ReFi or the Giving Block. But the main example I shared was Gitcoin.

Gitcoin Funds What Matters and uses onchain technology to support Public Goods. In the few short years they have been around, Gitcoin as raised and distrbuted over $60M from over 4.2M unique donors, all on open source, community owned tooling.

BASIN's current Gitcoin GG20 grant is 1 of 129 awesome Climate Solutions projects, 1 of 154 dApp projects, 1 of 35 impact certification projects, 1 of 23 regenerative land projects as well as part of two other funding rounds. There is over $1.3M of matching funding available for these Public Goods. Your donation is your vote that unlocks Quadratic Funding for these projects.

Whether or not we changed her mind does not really matter. People will think what they want to think.

Whether or not the positive impact and philanthropic currency project will use onchain technology is also an open question but that was part of the purpose of the work session. In my opinion and experience, how else can a currency be built? The systems the world is built on will not be able to compete with the open, permissionless, modular, interoperable and composable onchain infra being built in collaboratively in public. Not to mention the access to liquidity and the value accrual, both financial and social, that being onchain facilitates.

If you think or feel different, I invite you to change my mind.

If you are curious but unsure where to start I'd love to help you set up a wallet, send you some crypto and show you what we are building here at BASIN onchain. DM or email me we can do it as part of GG20.

If you are are already an onchain believer please support our Gitcoin grant in the current GG20 round.

Regardless of the stage you are at, our grant page goes deep on what we are up to and how we are doing it, all of which is only possible onchain.