A coin for education and philanthropy receives official backing

The SmileyCoin cryptocurrency received considerable recognition when the University of Iceland, the African Maths Initiative, Education in a Suitcase and Shuttle Thread Inc all signed an agreement to form the Board of the SmileyCoinFund, a fund in SmileyCoin to support education.

The agreement is in the form of a Mandate which sets the rules for how the fund can be allocated. The Board accepts applications for funding educational projects which support the use of SmileyCoin, e.g. in educational systems, for related R&D projects or for more general R&D projects which promote the use of the SmileyCoin.

This process completely removes the earlier premine and sets up a formal process whereby developers and/or educators can join forces and submit applications for SmileyCoin funding if their projects satisfy the requirements explained below.

Initial funding

The fund is kickstarted with the entire remainder of the SmileyCoin premine, a total of 15 bn Smileycoins. This is a considerable change for the SmileyCoin: Although the permissible use of the premine has always been openly accessible, it has not been in the form of a signed agreement nor has there been any formal procedure to handle requests for funding. Finally, although the premine was indeed traceable, it was somewhat obscure since it was mined into a total of one thousand addresses whereas the new use of a single multisig address implies much more transparency. Anyone can now click on a publicly accessible link to obtain an overview of deposits and withdrawals in a blockchain explorer.

Fundable endeavours

The mandate spells out in some detail how the Board handles applications and may allocate funds to projects.

Applications may be submitted by persons or organisations or even anonymously on behalf of established educational web systems such as tutor-web.net.

Applications must be sent to board@smileyco.in and should describe how the Smileycoin will be utilised and must conform to the following Application Rules, describing how the grant may be used:

• for rewarding students in a freely accessible educational system
• for Related R&D projects
• for R&D projects to promote the use of the Smileycoin

The rules are more formally defined in the Mandate. For example, a “Related R&D project” can be any research or development project relating to the tutor-web system, the SmileyCoin or on more general educational technologies. Normally these will be non-profit research projects on educational systems or the effects of grading schemes, reward schemes and so forth. Similarly, an “R&D project to promote the use of the Smileycoin” can be a project of any type with this goal. In particular this may be a project to use the Smileycoin in a commercial product.

Notably, although the Smileycoin premine was originally designed for rewarding students in the tutor-web system, the tutor-web administration now has to put in formal requests for funding like any other applicant.

It should also be noted that the intent is not to randomly throw Smileycoins around and certainly not to give out large amounts simply to be sold on exchanges. The intent is to promote the use of Smileycoins, particularly in education, but also in other fields such as computer games (which may make SmileyCoin payouts and/or accept SmileyCoin as payments) and so forth.

A few technical details

The actual fund is stored in a multisig address, specifically 3JT9LAzuMChCifVoQQK18BQV9z4BzpbQVH and anyone can now monitor how grants are allocated to different addresses. Spending requires at least two of the four signatories to sign a transaction, to be done only if there is no opposition within the board to a proposal for funding.

From a strictly technical point of view, the Board receives its mandate to control the funds simply by owning the electronic keys needed to transfer from the funds. Those earlier in charge of the premine addresses transferred their mandate to the Board by transmitting the entire remaining premine to the above address generated by the Board.

Click here for the full press release from the University of Iceland