More than $6billion has been pledged on
Kickstarter which has gone into funding upwards of 200 projects. These projects
have done a lot in raising the economic viability of startups to deal with
unemployment and value adding to the economy.
Up to 80,000 full time jobs have been
created and upwards of 750,000 part time jobs also. These projects have gone on
to become very successful businesses. Among these successful companies that
started off as Kickstarter campaigns are Peloton stationary bikes which raised
over $300,000. Also the oculus VR headset project raised $2.4 million dollars.
These successes have been the drive to push
forward for Kickstarter. However, a need for more decentralization was needed
to fulfill the company’s mission.
That mission is to help bring creative
projects to life. There has been a pledge to help unlock this latent potential
in people and their ideas. And so to stay true to that mission and to serve it
fervently, it is quite necessary that the company pays attention to its biggest
strength: A truly United community working towards a common goal.
Recently, in a joint statement by its
Founder and Chair, Perry Chen, and CEO, Aziz Hasan through the company’s blog,
it was announced that it will partner with Celo to build an open source
protocol that will create a decentralized version of the Kickstarter core
functionality.
It will go live on the Celo blockchain and
will be available for all to access. It is intended to be a perfect blend of
experience from over a decade of crowdfunding merged with the blockchain
network. This will make more projects accessible and will allow for the
complete transparency of the company vision.
Celo has been chosen because of its
devotion to the minimization of environmental impact and also the focus on
being a carbon negative blockchain platform.
There will always be that reminder by
building on Celo that there is a best practice to getting systems in place that
will work to help ourselves and our environment. Celo also has in its core the
focus to establish global accessibility through mobile access to the blockchain
and it has stayed true to this course. That will also impact the Kickstarter mission
profoundly.
Kickstarter also plans to create what it
calls a governance lab, separate from the existing company and the new one, to
provide independent governance for the protocol.
This aims at ensuring actual
decentralization of the project.
The new company does not have a name yet.
Development is slated to begin in the first quarter of next year, and
Kickstarter expects to transition its site to the new protocol sometime in
2022.