By Mark JurgensDeFi
Smart developers in South America are building the infrastructure for every human to receive a minimum income regularly.
The Universal Basic Income Solution
Universal Basic Income (UBI) has risen in the last years as probably the most ambitious social policy of our times.
Long discussions around dinner tables have been weighing in on the subject. Some think paying humans for being alive will make them lazy, but others believe it will make them leave their jobs to pursue their life-long dreams. Some think it´s unfair towards hard-working people, while others believe the current status quo is unfair. A well-applied UBI policy is probably somewhere in the middle of these extremes. And many argue it’s inevitable.
“Essentially, in the future, physical work will be a choice. This is why I think long term, there will need to be a universal basic income,” said Elon Musk during Tesla AI Day in 2021.
Even though humanity hasn’t come to a definitive conclusion regarding the effectiveness of UBI, rapid innovation in technologies like blockchain is allowing us to experiment and learn more about how to implement it correctly and how it could end up impacting society.
$UBI and Proof of Humanity
Proof of Humanity (PoH) is one of the leading digital identity projects working on this problem right now.
Founded by Santiago Siri, a well-known Argentinian developer and entrepreneur, the protocol is trying to create a decentralized network of verified humans receiving one $UBI token every hour. There are +15,000 humans already registered and receiving the $UBI drip.
Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum´s founder and one of PoH´s registered humans, commented on the importance of the protocol during a conference hosted by Santi Siri in December in Buenos Aires:
“Proof of Humanity is one of those things that is really important. It’s one of the big missing pieces of infrastructure that could make the Ethereum world a more inclusive place. If it provides people the ability to just get a little bit of crypto every month, just by putting up a profile, then that makes blockchain applications much more accessible.”
Over the past year, registered members received over $50M in $UBI. The team explains that all this value resides in its fair distribution system based on human time and that the currency scales with population. $UBI is the ‘currency layer’ needed to put a value on time on a global scale: each human, independent of country or religion, receives the same $UBI amount every hour.
Santiago Siri and the team is working now on UBI v2, exploring other funding strategies. The idea is to implement several mechanisms for burning tokens to ensure that the model also has sinks. In addition, the contracts have already been optimized to reduce the high Ethereum gas fees. Still, the UBI DAO will have to decide in the future if it´s viable to migrate to a Layer 2 solution for lower fees.
Check out this tutorial to start receiving your own Universal Basic Income.
Proof of Integrity: Onboarding Everyone to UBI
Proof of Integrity is a decentralized protocol working with Proof of Humanity´s $UBI token to educate and onboard low-income neighborhoods into the crypto ecosystem.
The project visited on March 21 the Barrio Carlos Mugica, or Villa 31, to learn more about the area and the needs of its population. With over 50,000 residents, it’s one of the 4,000 precarious neighborhoods across Argentina. The following steps will be to provide financial education and onboard people to universal basic income with $UBI.
Jano, fundraising strategist at PoI, shared the project´s vision on Twitter Spaces on March 31:
“We visit neighborhoods with a team of certifiers looking to encourage new users to register so that they can start receiving a universal basic income in their own wallets. All the transaction costs and the initial staking will be financed by donors. In parallel, we are also working on technology and financial training workshops.”
The Proof of Integrity DAO has raised more than 46,000 $DAI from Gitcoin to kickstart the philanthropic effort. According to the website, the platform isn´t fully launched, but it is releasing an MVP really soon.
What is Proof of Humanity?
Proof of Humanity (PoH) is a decentralized, AI-resistant, and economically incentivized registry of human beings using social verification. UBI is the first application built on the PoH registry. The $UBI token is streamed directly to an Ethereum address as long as it gets verified as a human in the registry.
PoH was launched by the blockchain protocol Kleros (built on top of Ethereum) and the non-profit Democracy Earth Foundation.
Find more about Proof of Humanity here:
What is Proof of Integrity?
Proof of Integrity (PoI) is a decentralized and non-profit protocol to certify who is in need of Universal Basic Income. Certified applicants will be eligible for different philanthropy programs, and donors will be able to “adopt a human” or delegate their $UBI tokens for later distribution to applicants.
The protocol works with Proof of Humanity (PoH) to find those struggling to cover their basic needs and integrate them with the $UBI token drip.
Find more about Proof of Integrity here:
Source web3wire.news
