To lift more people out of extreme poverty, we need to grow the market cap of Glo Dollar.

This growth happens when individuals, DAOs or businesses decide to convert (some of) their money to Glo Dollars.

Our goal is for every $20,000 of Glo Dollar to generate $480 per year, lifting one person out of extreme poverty.

This is what we expect once Glo Dollar adoption reaches sufficient scale. We'll make this assumption throughout this article.

We can have a huge impact just meeting current stablecoin use cases.

The stablecoin market is currently valued at about $130 billion. That means we have a long runway, just within the existing market, where we can keep growing and keep having impact:

• At a $2 billion market cap, Glo Dollar would be the 16th largest stablecoin and would lift 100,000 people out of extreme poverty. 
• At $20 billion, Glo Dollar would be the third largest stablecoin and would lift 1 million people out of extreme poverty.
• A $100 billion stablecoin, which would make us the market leader—but only 25% bigger than the current leader—would lift 5 million people out of extreme poverty.

How do we plan to kickstart Glo Dollar adoption? 

The very first to adopt Glo Dollar are our Glo supporters—people who resonate with the Glo vision and support the project. Simultaneously, we’ll be working with market makers, OTC desks, and exchanges to make Glo Dollar broadly available to the broader crypto ecosystem. Telling people about Glo Dollar goes a lot further once they can actually buy it!

Once we establish those fundamentals, our first priority is to become the stablecoin of choice for DAOs. The top 13 DAOs hold about $1 billion in stablecoins. If 10% of that were converted to USDGLO, they’d be lifting 5,000 people out of extreme poverty. If Glo Dollar were 50% of that market, that number would grow to 25,000.

That’s as simple as switching currencies: no donation required. From there, rinse and repeat, getting more and more people and institutions on board to the ethical currency. 

We think the stablecoin market is poised to grow over time.

The stablecoin market has grown from about $220 million six years ago to over $130 billion today. That’s over 9 doublings in a 6 year period, and we don’t think the stablecoin market is tapped out by any means. That’s because stablecoins are increasingly being used to solve real world problems. 

One of the most exciting is real-time gross settlement (RTGS), i.e. banks’ settling their accounts with each other. Recent research suggests that while stablecoins “started out as on-chain cash balances for crypto exchanges and traders,” recent activity is much more consistent with the RTGS use case. That’s because stablecoins offer numerous advantages over TradFi for settlements, including programmability, traceability, and wide accessibility. 

Ditto with cross-border remittances, a $700 billion market in 2020 plagued with inefficiencies and high transaction costs. We think stablecoins are poised to transform this market for the better. If Glo Dollar grows to become the market leader here—say we’re 20% of all volume, for $140 billion—then Glo Dollar will already be bigger than all current stablecoins combined, and would be lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty. 

Another huge market for stablecoins is cashless payments in emerging markets. This use case is on track to reach $500 billion in 2023, and grow to $2 trillion by 2027. However, existing payment systems are riddled by expensive fees, and many such markets are at risk of hyperinflation. Fiat-backed stablecoins offer a more predictable means of exchange and implicit access to more reliable banking infrastructure. If Glo Dollar provides a quarter of the volume for this $2 trillion dollar market, it will lift 25 million people out of poverty every year.

Glo Dollar’s embedded philanthropy model provides a compelling reason for consumers & businesses to adopt stablecoins for the first time.

Crypto adoption for payments hasn't taken off. In large part that's because there isn't a good reason to ditch normal money—credit cards work well enough. Businesses might be unhappy with the fees, and credit card debt is soon to exceed $1 trillion in the United States alone; but that won’t be enough to get people to adopt new technology en masse. Imperfect systems can last for a long time if they’re entrenched enough.

With the introduction of Glo Dollar, this changes. We believe that the philanthropy embedded into Glo Dollar gives it a competitive advantage over any other cryptocurrency. Glo Dollar is the first time you can reduce global inequality and advance social justice just by switching to a new currency.

Some use cases where Glo Dollar’s mission is a huge leg up:

• Corporate rewards programs and gift cards. Delta and American Airlines combined to earn over $10 billion revenue in 2022 from corporate loyalty programs, and researchers estimate that Americans are sitting on over $21 billion in unspent gift cards. Because Glo Dollar is pegged to the dollar, both are (theoretically) equally useful as a unit of account. Why not hold those balances in a currency that lifts people out of poverty? 
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• In-app payments. The EU’s Digital Markets Act requires that the large online platforms offer alternatives to their native payment systems to consumers. This is a market worth billions—Starbucks alone has been known to sit on over $1 billion in unspent, in-app dollars. We’re picturing Glo Dollar as the conscious consumer choice for in-app transactions: the Patagonia of money. 
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• Splitting bills. Before Glo Dollar, there was no reason to use anything besides your local fiat currency when you’re splitting a check or paying a friend back for gas. With Glo Dollar, there’s finally a reason to switch to a stablecoin, so long as that stablecoin lifts people out of poverty. 
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• ESG investing. Environmental, social, and corporate governance funds are here to stay, with a total value of about $2.5 trillion under management at the end of 2022. While some funds are aimed only at companies with high ESG ratings, even funds that don’t are still broadly concerned with their ESG ratings. Putting some of their cash on hand into Glo Dollar is an easy way to advance social justice goals while keeping the total value of the fund the same.

We’ll work to make Glo Dollar as spendable as a regular dollar.

We can make this happen in a few ways:

• Glo Dollar-backed debit cards. Businesses such as crypto exchanges could offer payment cards that work like any other debit card, except they're connected to a Glo Dollar wallet.
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• Direct merchant acceptance. Individual merchants can choose to directly accept payments in the form of Glo Dollar, similar to how some places allow you to pay with bitcoin.
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• Platform-side Glo Dollar support. Payment platforms such as Stripe and PayPal could allow Glo Dollar payments, which they then convert to normal money before the merchant receives it.

Inspired? You can help make this vision a reality.

Glo Dollar is driven by its community. If you want to help end extreme poverty, buy Glo Dollars.