## Highlights 
* impactMarket is a poverty alleviation protocol that enables any vulnerable community to implement financial inclusive mechanisms, like Unconditional Basic Income (UBI).
* After 1 year, the protocol distributed $1.5M+ cUSD as UBI to almost 30 thousand beneficiaries living in the most vulnerable communities in 25+ developing countries. 
* impactMarket has raised $1.6M+ from mission-aligned investors, including Celo Foundation, Davoa Capital, Flori Ventures, Eutopia Foundation, and more.

## Product 
### Decentralized Poverty Alleviation Protocol
impactMarket is an application-layer protocol designed to fight extreme poverty quickly and effectively, while empowering local & social change, bottom-up economic development, and prosperity.

It operates as a DAO, on top of the Celo network, uses cUSD (Celo Dollar) as the main digital currency and $PACT as its governance token, while running autonomously through smart contracts.

Beyond UBI, impactMarket is working on providing free access to more financial services. Given the Celo network design and its current DeFi ecosystem, impactMarket is uniquely positioned to drive DeFi adoption and retention by integrating & offering DeFi solutions directly on mobile to those who need them the most. Hence, impactMarket will emphasize but will not be limited to:

* Deposit assets and redirect the earned interest (or yield) to support vulnerable communities while claiming $PACT rewards. No donation? No problem. 
* Micro Credit: Beneficiaries will be able to use their own $PACT or $CELO as collateral for instant access to credit in cUSD.
* Virtual Fair, where beneficiaries can sell and buy stuff (or content as NFT) among their communities, like community-based e-commerce marketplaces.
* Collective Savings + prize, incentivizing beneficiaries to save together within their own communities. The higher the savings, the higher the prizes.
* Crowd Lending where anyone can allocate assets as collateral and delegate credit in $cUSD to specific beneficiaries, causes, or communities.
* Explore other possibilities, such as beneficiaries’ stories & art as NFTs (could be used as collateral, or to help raise funds for their community), access to yield farming, learn & earn, paid tasks and more.

In order for impactMarket to monitor and provide transparency and analytics about its impact on its stakeholders, the team is developing an impact measurement framework, made available via different aggregated sources, including on-chain data analysis performed on the Celo network. 

* Self-reporting from beneficiaries through regular specific surveys that measure life quality improvement and progress on several verticals of their life, including health, education, impact on their children, security, happiness, nutrition, etc.
* Identify merchants, key intermediaries, and influencers. Attach content to transactions.
* On-chain data analysis to understand, on a deeper level, economic development, activity, growth, and behavior. Cross public information and benchmark different approaches.
* Predictive analytics to forecast potential outcomes when kickstarting new communities.
![impactMarket Product](https://assets.polkastarter.com/ov5korkfxsz132336ipfwfjui9n2)

## Problem
### Extreme Poverty: the biggest limiting factor for human potential and development
About 10% of the population in the world lives in extreme poverty. At the same time, decades of progress tackling this problem are now in reverse due to covid.

* ~2 billion people unbanked;
* ~30% of aid is lost to corruption;
* Too many intermediaries & borders impacting philanthropic efforts;
* Due to covid, extreme poverty can rise to 750 million people this year.

Globally, the number of people living in extreme poverty declined from 36% in 1990 to 10 % in 2015. But the pace of change is decelerating and the COVID-19 crisis risks reversing decades of progress in the fight against poverty. New research published by the UNU World Institute for Development Economics Research warns that the economic fallout from the global pandemic could increase global poverty by as much as half a billion people, or 8% of the total human population. This would be the first time that poverty has increased globally in thirty years, since 1990.

More than 700 million people, or 10%of the world population, still live in extreme poverty today, struggling to fulfill the most basic needs like health, education, and access to water and sanitation, to name a few. The majority of people living on less than $1.90 a day live in sub-Saharan Africa. Worldwide, the poverty rate in rural areas is 17.2% — more than three times higher than in urban areas.


## Solution 
### Fighting poverty through web3-powered financial inclusion
impactMarket is an open, free, censorship-resistant, and borderless impact-driven crowdfinance marketplace to fight poverty. 

It merges the principles of unconditional basic income with blockchain technology to enable any community to have access to a basic income through its own UBI smart contract with specific parameters based on their reality. Beneficiaries added to those contracts can claim cUSD on a regular basis and use it for whatever they want or need.

impactMarket has been a catalyst to unlock human potential by effectively fighting poverty, with the ambition to reach 1B+ people by 2030 and become a significant contributor to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 1. On the way there, it might also become one of the biggest open financial infrastructures. impactMarket is being built to:

* Accelerate poverty alleviation, access to finance, and wealth redistribution
* Ensure the primacy of the individual and the social objective over capital
* Allow democratic governance, autonomous management, and independence of the protocol from public and central authorities

#### “Basic income is venture capital for the people” - Rutger Bregman

Aligned with the protocol’s mission and vision, it’s been developed to be very scalable and self-sustaining. Currently scoped, the core deliverables will be:

* Integration with existing DeFi protocols on Celo to provide open, free & easy access to Mobile Finance (MoFi), focused on beneficiaries.
* Self-governed communities through social consensus, where beneficiaries vouch for who they believe should/need access to a basic income while building reputation, identity, & trust indicators.
* Develop a low volatility currency, not pegged to anything, minted by beneficiaries, and backed by a reserve of different assets deposited by contributors (instead of donations) to help absorb volatility. This can unlock orders of magnitude improvements in scalability and reachability.


## Business Model
### Let’s DAO it! Impact-driven DeFi solutions
impactMarket is an open and free protocol that anyone can access and benefit from. As the protocol is now becoming a DAO, it will be up to token holders to propose and decide new mechanisms and revenue streams.

Current potential revenue streams being considered to help the company to support operations, development and growth:
* SaaS with advanced dashboards, impact measurement, and analytics for major contributors and decision-makers.
* Licensing through whitelabel to be used by larger organizations, cities, or even countries.

With $2M+ raised (pre-seed + seed equity rounds + IDO), impactMarket will be able to keep developing its technology and expanding to more vulnerable communities for the next 18+ months.


## Market 
### Extreme poverty and financial assistance: for an old problem, new solutions
There’s still a massive lack of access to finance, and a lack of efficiency and transparency on philanthropy, especially when it comes to the distribution of the funds that are raised, because there is no infrastructure and there are too many intermediaries and borders to reach those most in need. There are some projects related with cash transfers to people living in vulnerable conditions (but not using blockchain, such as GiveDirectly), and there are several web3 projects focused on UBI, such as Proof of humanity, GoodDollar, CirclesUBI, Anatha and WorldCoin. impactMarket stands out as a decentralized protocol focused on poverty alleviation, enabling vulnerable communities from all over the world to benefit from Unconditional Basic Income. Thanks to impactMarket’s smart contracts and DAO mechanisms, it can scale fast, thus reaching more beneficiaries where it’s most needed, distributing UBI with efficiency and transparency, while empowering users - PACT token holders - to influence the future of the protocol. 

 
## Investors  
### Mission-aligned investors
The project has raised more than $1.6M since inception from VCs and individuals.
* Institutional investors: Celo Foundation, Davoa Capital, Flori Ventures, Eutopia Foundation, & Valora;
* Individual investors include Diogo Monica (Anchorage), Marek Olszewski (Celo), Deepak Nuli (Kresko), Evan Kereiakes (Ubeswap) and more.
![impactMarket Investors](https://assets.polkastarter.com/pb2k0nc0zq8n10wo41jdlar5wvgu)


## Team 
### Impact (Dream) Team

The impactMarket team has a strong background on philanthropy, web3 and social impact, with experience on working in organizations like Uphold, eSolidar, Microsoft, WEF, Facebook, Unicef, Human Rights Watch and WHO.

* Marco Barbosa (Co-founder & CEO): Forbes 30 under 30 for Social Entrepreneurship. Co-founder (2013) eSolidar. Master’s Degree in Computer Science.
* Bernardo Vieira (Co-founder & CTO): Blockchain developer. Won multiple blockchain hackathons. Bachelor in Computer Science.
* Afonso Barbosa (Co-founder & CPO): Worked at Facebook, Quanta, Vyu Labs, eSolidar and Edigma/Displax. Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science.

![impactMarket Team](https://assets.polkastarter.com/3i4uh46uvd9m4qsye7b5zs8krilq)

## Token Utility 
### $PACT: governing the protocol’s direction and impact

$PACT tokens will act as a global medium of governance that empowers participants through decision-making and comprehensive incentive mechanisms. Token holders will be granted the ability to influence the future health, direction, growth, and impact of the protocol.

* **Voting power delegation** Any token holder can delegate voting power to themselves, someone they trust, or key participants of the protocol. Those with the most delegated voting power can be considered impactMarket ambassadors.
* **Communities’ verification and validation** Each new UBI community will be submitted as a proposal and reviewed by token holders, who can vote for its approval. Verified communities are able to request funding directly from the DAO.
* **Manage/Update key parameters, calculation formulas, treasury allocation, and incentives**

About 40% of total supply will be available to be claimed by participants through impact farming, an incentive mechanism that allows anyone to claim $PACT tokens as rewards for their cUSD contributions/donations to vulnerable communities.


impactMarket

impactMarket - Decentralized Poverty Alleviation Protocol

Decentralized Poverty Alleviation Protocol