Born from ConsenSys, Umoja Labs seeks to connect the $1T mobile money market to DeFi across emerging markets — In 2017, ConsenSys introduced ConsenSys Social Impact (CSI), the world’s first blockchain consultancy purpose-built to use Web3 technology for good. Over the next 3 years, CSI would go on to deploy decentralized applications (a.k.a. “dApps”) and inclusion programs across 17 different countries including initiatives such as:

Bringing value to donations by tokenizing the impact from the efforts they help finance & balancing impact accounting — “A good deal of philanthropy arises in general from mere vanity and love of distinction gilded over to others and to themselves with some show of benevolent sentiment.” — Sir Walter Scott Many people who donate to charity believe it’s important to help people in need. They feel that people…

Leveraging Centrifuge’s Tinlake to Bring Decentralized Liquidity to Micro-lending — 2020 was arguably the most turbulent year in modern history, with the COVID-19 pandemic claiming over 2.06M lives (at the time of this writing) and much of the world falling into a dystopian, socially distanced, and economically recessed reality. Despite many of the drawbacks of the pandemic, its socioeconomic effects…

How Maker DAO Could’ve Minimized the Harm of Black Thursday Note: The following brief is simply a thought exercise to determine ways that the Maker Foundation could have avoided (or softened) the impact of “Black Thursday.” March 12, 2020 is a date known as “Black Thursday” within the crypto-community. On…

Over the past several months amidst the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, a looming economic recession, and even potential depression have begun to impact those most in need. According to the International Labour Organization (ILO), some 1.6 billion people employed in the informal economy — or nearly half the global…

Ending ConsenSys’s social sector journey and beginning anew — Over the past several months, the world has been gravely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the U.S. alone, nearly 22 million people have filed for unemployment in four weeks between mid-March and early April, increasing the unemployment rate past 4.4% after a record of 113 months of employment growth…

How digital cash aid can support millions during a pandemic — As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to worsen, many countries are developing economic stimulus packages to avoid a further dive into what seems will be a global recession until a clear vaccine is developed. Provided the minimum 1-year timeline to develop such a vaccine, governments are once again struggling with an…

How the strongest use cases for DeFi and dApps are in the social sector — As the prevalence of blockchain technology continues to increase, we are beginning to see commercial, public, and social sector markets alike transition from a state of education to one of project implementation. Emergent patterns around how the technology is being used and which use cases will most likely scale first…