A cryptocurrency with a vision
The vision
Our vision is improved educational opportunities in low-income regions. It turns out that cryptocurrency has an important role in making this vision a reality.
Many years ago we asked whether it could be made possible for a secondary school student in Kenya to earn the equivalent of $1 per day just by studying. Achieving this for a large number of students is a way to realise the vision of the Smiley Charity.
We have a toolbox to help us move towards this vision and goals to achieve on the way. The road to the goals is paved with deliverables. The toolbox is the result of many years of research and development along with testing in various environments, documented in the form of several research publications.
The toolbox consists of educational technologies which assist learners through their studies. The toolbox also consists of funding methods and reward mechanisms for the learners.
The following describes the toolbox, the goals and how we aim to attain these to work towards the vision.
Funding, rewards and the SmileyCoin
The first tool in the toolbox is the tutor-web, an open and freely accessible on-line system which students can use when studying, particularly mathematics. The tutor-web is not just a random tool as it is backed by real research.
To make the tutor-web accessible to students in low-income regions, the Smiley Charity donates tablet computers. The tablets can then also be used for other activities, but in most cases mathematics is the single biggest hurdle that students face on their way to university. The exact format varies but during COVID-19 we have mostly been donating to libraries who lend the tablets to students: Schools in Kenya were closed which led to all sorts of problems but also paved the way to new and improved solutions.
Funds for these tablets are raised mostly through grants and donations. Grant applications are submitted to any fund which may support the project and donations are accepted by several means, including through a Patreon page. This is “just work” and not novel but each new grant is a bit of a milestone in itself.
The SmileyCoin cryptocurrency was originally developed as a reward mechanism for students who work on drills in the tutor-web system. Being a cryptocurrency, however, means that it can have multiple uses outside the system, unlike tokens in many other educational systems.
The SmileyCoin has been modified in many ways to help support education and charity. For example, miner who mine SmileyCoin automatically donate 45% of all newly minted coins to the Smiley Charity which pays some of it forward to other projects. This is all documented in a peer-reviewed research publication in a professional journal.
Similarly several options have been made available for students to use their SmileyCoin outside the tutor-web. For example, students in Kenyan libraries can purchase the tablets for the SmileyCoin which they earn while studying. In 2018 this was set as a goal and this has now been achieved with several students purchasing their tablets in January 2021!
Students studying in the libraries can also register to receive a small Universal Basic Income. Some of the libraries run a small store where students can purchase small items for SMLY for the UBI, such as foodstuff, sanitary pads or airtime cards. The store can be as simple as items on a single desk.
The UBI and the store were goals, set in 2019 and both have been reached in the first few months of 2021!
A related goal is to raise sufficient general interest in the SmileyCoin to make it possible for the Smiley Charity (and other charities) to sell SMLY to support their activities. Enhancing the sellability of SMLY also helps to make the UBI and tablet sales self-sustainable, as opposed to requiring grants.
The SmileyCoin as a tool for fundraising
The SmileyCoin blockchain has been extended to allow easy registration of charities on the blockchain. Such charities then become directly accessible from the SMLY wallets, so anyone anywhere can point and click to donate SMLY to the charity. In this way the SmileyCoin has become the easiest tool available to donate to charity, which is an important goal towards making the SMLY more generally useful.
Clearly, for a cryptocurrency it is not enough to simply exist. There have to be use cases and there has to be a demand for the currency for it to have real value. For example, for Bitcoin the largest single use case is investment and for Ethereum the largest use case is smart contracts.
SmileyCoin already has one important use case which is to support students. Unfortunately such payments to students only create supply, not demand for SMLY.
However, getting multiple charities to accept SMLY would create a demand by those picking up SmileyCoin for donation purposes.
So here is a medium-term goal for SmileyCoin: Become the go-to coin for donations!
The total value of donations to charity in the US alone is over 400 million USD per year. If but a fraction of this is funnelled through the SmileyCoin economy then that will gather much more volume than has been seen before.
To achieve this goal requires several steps or deliverables. The first step is to make it technically easy for any potential donor to donate. This has been achieved. Another step is to make it very easy for a potential donor to get SmileyCoin.
But it is also important to get a large number of charities or non-profit organisation on-board. The first step in that process is to make it trivially easy for a charity to accept SMLY and that has already been implemented technically through offering each charity a paper wallet with QR-codes and registering the donation addresses into the blockchain. But the more important implementation step is reaching out to a large number of charities and convincing them to accept the paper wallet. This is work planned for 2021 and 2022, with an aim to get 100 charities listed on-chain in 2022. When that happens we will put a checkmark against the goal of being the go-to coin for charity: No other cryptocurrency coin has achieved this status yet.
Getting investors on-board
In addition to all of the above, the SmileyCoin needs investors. A number of individuals and organisations have supported the overall project, sometimes receiving a few SMLY in return. But here we mean purchasing considerable quantities of SMLY, whether by many small investors or a few large ones. This may be done purely for profit or for supporting the project. Those investing for profit will look to increasing prices as well as the dividends which SmileyCoin holders automatically receive if they store more than 25 million SMLY in one address.
Several smaller investors are already actively purchasing SMLY on a daily basis. Work is underway to attract large-scale investors and one investment company has already been set up just to invest in SmileyCoin.
Summary
By giving the SmileyCoin new use cases and increasing demand for the coin, it can in principle fully sustain all the activities of the Smiley Charity and support expansions into new territories.
We propose doing this by convincing a large number of charities to accept the coin for donations and obtaining several investors who purchase the coin.
This costs the charities no initial work at all as they can simply receive a paper wallet and only decide to use it when they receive a minimal value in SMLY donations.
The hope is that through these approaches we will move towards the vision of providing much improved access to education in low-income regions.