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Podcast Audio
Dec 27, 2022

Ending extreme poverty with the anti-poverty version of the dollar

In this podcast, Jeff and Jasper talk with Grant Trahant, Founder of Causeartist, about using blockchain to end extreme poverty through a fully backed stablecoin.

Social impact
Stablecoins
Ending extreme poverty with the anti-poverty version of the dollar
43 minutes

Transcript

Grant: [00:00:00] What’s up everybody this is Grant that cause artist. Happy new year to everybody out there. I Hope 2022 is a great year for you and your loved ones.

 If you enjoy this podcast and you listen on Spotify, please go ahead and review when you get a chance. If you listen on Apple podcast, go ahead and leave a review as well. 

That would be great. Really helps a lot. Let’s get into the conversation in the show. We’ll talk soon. Thanks. 

‍

Grant: Thank you, Jeff and Jasper, for joining me today. We’re going to go into the weeds on a lot of different things. Ending extreme poverty is obviously a big task and a big journey, 

and as we see the world of finance changing, how do we get money across the world and how we can deliver impact in a lot of different ways crypto can do that, but I think before we get into stablecoin, 

and what Glo is, and its mission and vision, Let’s get into each of your backgrounds. Jeff let’s start with you, on what brought you into starting Glo and getting into this mission of solving extreme poverty.

Jeff: Absolutely and thanks for having us. I really appreciate it. It was two summers ago. I met Sid Sabrandy in the summer of 2021, and he had an idea for creating a cryptocurrency around generating basic income and helping solve extreme poverty. 

This kind of comes from this idea of… He gave some money to GiveDirectly as a donation, saw the impact there, thinking about the scale of the problem of extreme poverty, 

and then could we build a sustainable way to generate money using a cryptocurrency to actually make a huge impact in solving the problem of extreme poverty. So, it was an early idea of a white paper, a document shared with me. 

I joined thinking about the ideas as a consultant. I decided to jump on as the CEO and build a startup around this idea, and it really was just here's a huge problem in the world.

We know there's a lot of impact from doing cash transfers. Can we use and create a sustainable mechanism using cryptocurrency and create something that can have a huge impact on this problem? 

Now my background was in academia. I was teaching finance, economics, and blockchain fintech courses. I specifically taught an international aid course,

 and I thought this specific problem was really interesting and understanding how fundamentally people need money and capital to generate economic growth, and I thought it was a really important aspect of what to work on in the world and I was pretty inspired by the idea.

Grant: How did the Academia Community react when you said I'm leaving you for a cryptocurrency startup? [chuckle]

Jeff: I’ve had some meetings with a lot of colleagues early on when I was forming some of these ideas and starting the project and they're all pretty excited about it. 

It's the ambitious kind of thinking and the global problem solving that's very academic and sense of thinking of models and mechanisms and theories around how do you construct the right economies and build institutions. 

The applied aspect is a little different. I think it's interesting to think of what kind of product in the world, what solution in the world is actually going to lead to this transformational change that economic theory would support in that sense, 

but it’s really positive, really exciting to shift into this startup mindset and build something that people are going to use.

Grant: Awesome. Jasper, do you want to jump in and talk about your journey real quick? 

Jasper: Definitely. My background is in computer science and artificial intelligence. Interestingly I'm kind of backed through technology now, but When I graduated I gradually moved away from technology.

At first, I thought that was really my thing. And then I realized more and more that what is interesting to me is not really the technology itself, but more what it could mean to people and to people’s daily lives. 

I wanted to be a product manager. I got the opportunity to be a product manager at a Fintech start-up. That's Interestingly how my career got a bit more into money. 

At first, I always considered money a very boring topic [chuckles], but hey I wanted to be a product manager at a startup and they had a job for me I just thought okay,

I’ll do this, but then you go into it more and more and more, and at some point, you realize that there’s more to it than you had thought on the surface level. 

Further down the rabbit hole I got into crypto. Honestly, this opportunity at Glo came quite out of the blue to me. 

It’s kind of a blessing because I never really considered the direction my career was taking to at some point coincide with my ideals because at some point I was into fintech and into crypto and I was like okay,

I guess I’ll have to get my moral satisfaction and things outside of my job, and then things started perfectly coming together when I heard about this project that is, 

on one hand, using this awesome profit-seeking thing called cryptocurrency, but then using it for something completely different, which is basic income and economic equality.

Grant: [00:05:05] I want to try to phrase this question in a way we’re all going to come at it from the same level, as hopefully all listeners, we can kind of guide ourselves here. 

When a person maybe asks you what Glo is, how do you explain it to them? Obviously, you might explain it to them from a very crypto-native person who understands stale coins and bitcoin and Ethereum and how blockchain works, 

but it’s very different if you're talking at a conference right? You’re at a general tech conference or a general impact conference, and somebody asks, what is Glo? How do you explain it to them? 

Jasper: I actually like explaining it to people who are not into crypto perhaps even more, because it’s more challenging. Think about it like this. 

Extreme poverty is one of the worst problems in the world, but the good news is that for a lot of countries reducing extreme poverty can actually be done relatively simple. 

There's a surprisingly simple solution, and that simple solution is giving money, giving basic incomes, And we're talking in the order of magnitude of $35, $40 a month. 

That has been done on quite small scales and it seems to work quite well generally. So, that's good because now we have a big societal problem and a solution that seems to work relatively well, 

and the question is how can we scale that up? If you want to scale up basic incomes, you just need more money to give away. Of course, there are other things as well. 

You need distribution networks, and there's a whole operational challenge behind that, but one thing you definitely need is more money to give away. 

Now, most basic income programs so far are based on donated money, so charitable donations or for an A budgets [00:06:52]. Then the question is, is there enough of that to really crank up this basic income program solution? 

And our answer to that, and we can go into a bit more detail about why we think that we believe the answer is no. We believe donation-based philanthropy is amazing. 

If you donate to charities, please keep doing it, but the average American household gives away 1.8% of their income, which means that 98.2% of the money you earn is not going to charity. 

So, most of your money is not going to charity, and Glo is the answer to the question, can we change the way our money works? Such that philanthropy is actually embedded in the currency itself so that just using money, 

rather than giving it away, just using a particular type of money is already doing something good and that’s what the Glo dollar is. To actually do that in real life, we use cryptocurrency, 

but that’s not really what it’s about. In fact, lately, our cryptocurrency has been working against us more than it has helped us, but there’s no way around it. If you want to change how money works; 

if you want to create a new kind of money, and we're creating a new kind of money, how do you do that without crypto? so that’s why we're using crypto.

Jeff: It’s money on blockchain. I think crypto vs what Glo is, I want people to kind of separate those things. We can talk about that more,

 but blockchain is a technology and a consensus sediment layer that’s really been proven to be extremely useful and I think building money on that is a scalable way to do this and we’ll talk about how we can get to the billions and billions of dollars of income generation that can help solve this problem, 

so it’s less about crypto. It’s more about using these technologies to build a form of money that, again like Jasper said, embedded philanthropy, embedded income generation within the actual money you're using.

Grant: Let's really touch on separating Glo, or stablecoins, let's put that in one bucket, versus, I guess, we’ll take the two biggest examples, bitcoin and Ethereum. Let’s separate those and talk about stablecoins and how that acts differently, perhaps than bitcoin and Ethereum, and why you think this is the best mechanism for Glo is to be a stablecoin.

Jeff:  So stablecoin. Let's just talk about the price or the value that people see. That’s first important. Stablecoin is pegged to one dollar if it’s U.S. denominated. Other cryptocurrencies that aren’t pegged,

 they’re going to fluctuate in value. So bitcoin, Ether, you see the price change dramatically relative to U.S. Dollars. You get into a lot of speculative talk and exchanges and all those things. 

With The stablecoin, our model is it’s going to be a Fiat fully backed stablecoin and when people refer to the different types of stablecoin, we’re a centralized stablecoin vs a decentralized one, 

and what that means is we’re going to take in actual dollars, actual Fiat money, and support the price and peg it one to one. So there’s actual real money backing the stablecoin value and that’s going to keep its value in the markets. 

It’s a totally separate type of cryptocurrency if we're going to use that term because we’re not something on the blockchain that represents… Bitcoin is a native cryptocurrency of the bitcoin network and blockchain Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the Ethereum network. 

Ether is used to process transactions. That’s all part of that infrastructure. We’re building on top of these blockchains and using the tool of crypto to actually create a form of money that’s really supported in terms of value.

Grant: [00:10:25] Let's talk a little bit about how it works for individuals or companies even, because both can participate in this. How does Glo start? You need people to believe in it. You need people to actually send money to the reserve, so you can then invest it. We'll get into the Treasury bill part, but talk about how you get money into Glo.

Jasper: I think it might help to compare what we're doing. compare with what Patagonia is doing or Newman's Own, if you know that brand. Patagonia is an interesting example. 

Recently, as you're probably aware; the whole company has been donated to a climate NGO, which means that Patagonia is just a company that's going to continue about its business as it has been doing. 

It’s continuing to create garments and sell them and making a profit except that this profit doesn't go to shareholders anymore but it just goes to a charity, and the effect of that is that you as an individual now have two ways to contribute to this charity. 

You can either directly donate money to this charity or you can buy Patagonia products and then your purchase is actually having a charitable effect. 

Now, I'm not here to advertise for a Patagonia, but it's an interesting example because that means that at first the 1.8% of your money was charitable and the other 98.2% of your money Wasn't charitable, 

but let's say you, I don't know if this is realistic, but let's say you spend on average 5% of your income on garments and let's say you buy all of that at Patagonia. 

Now, this 5% That your spending on clothing is also going to be charitable, and what we're trying to do is, what if we can get 100% of your money to be charitable? 

The question Is of course what would the analog of what Patagonia did be for money? You could do it for toilet paper. You could have a toilet paper company that donates 100% of the profits to charity. 

But how do you do it with money? How we do it is this. Let's say you want to contribute to this plan. you have $1,000 laying around. Maybe you're using them as your rainy-day savings. you send it to us, 

and we keep your thousand real dollars, but we're going to give you a thousand Glo dollars. you can kind of consider them vouchers, and at any point that you want to reverse that, you can do that. 

You can just send us a $1,000 Glo dollars back and will give you your real money back but in the meantime, we are not just going to keep your dollars sitting idly by in a bank account, 

but we're going to hold part of them in US treasury bills, so that's US government bonds, which are very low risk and it's very unlikely that they will lose your value, 

but we do get a little bit of interest on them and that interest is the money that we're going to donate, which means that in this transaction you have lost no purchasing power but we did make money on your money which we're giving away.

Jeff: It's very similar to… think about it. You put money into a bank account, a checking account. The bank takes that money, creates loans and does something else with it to earn interest and make profits for their operations. 

We're saying you give us actual money, Fiat money, and we hold it. 100% back. we're not actually creating mortgages or doing the fractional Reserve banking if you know those terms. 

We're 100% going to keep your Glo dollars supported, so you can trust that it's going to be worth $1, and then that 100% is backed by us treasuries at very short maturities so it's very liquid and people want to redeem, 

it it's going to be there there's no huge risk in terms of the actual money not backing the currency. So, I want to make sure people know that it's 100% reserved back rather than the fractional Reserve back like you see with banks.

Grant: And just to be clear. Glo is itself a non-profit. So again take the parallel. Circle is probably one of the most well-known stablecoins. They do kind of the same thing, the difference is they are a company, so they would take that interest and that would be profit for Circle as a business, 

as a for-profit entity, where you take the interest from the treasury bills and instead of profit that goes back into Glo that profit goes to ending extreme poverty via people around the world through, and this is how I think how we'll get into the next part, 

how does it end extreme poverty? what are the steps? And you're partnered with GiveDirectly correct? And the gains that are made goes to GiveDirectly and they disperse the funds to people in extreme poverty? Is that sort of the flow?

Jeff: [00:15:27] That's right. And I think the Circle nonprofit conversation, real quick is, we are nonprofit and we think that's important for a couple reasons. 

One, because we want to support the mission Of ending extreme poverty, and two, as a nonprofit, us as employees, and as the leadership of the organization, we have no incentive to be risky with the reserve of assets with customer funds. 

We have no for-profit incentives to maximize our own income or the company's income. whereas a company like Circle is a for-profit company. Just like any other for-profit bank, they're going to be doing things to maximize profits which is totally rational. So, 

I think that's an important differentiator in terms of… as a product of stablecoin in the market, the actual structure of the organization is a key aspect of the trust in that part. The GiveDirectly part is how the donations actually get put into the world.

Jasper: So maybe just to give a sense of scale. I think that's interesting, so the stablecoin model is not new at all. It's an existing thing in the crypto world and The biggest ones, as you mentioned, are Circle but also Tether. 

Circle and Tether serve a need in the crypto World which is to have something that lives in the blockchain that will always be worth a dollar and people generally use it to trade with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. These companies are surprisingly profitable. 

To take Circle as an example their Market Gap right now is $42 billion which means [cross talk]

Grant: That was a lot.

Jasper: That's a lot right, so that leads [crosstalk]

Grant: Crypto too, right? I mean they haven't been in that long right?  they're not a decade long I don't think huh?

Jasper: I think they were founded in 2018.

Jeff: Okay. Yeah, so quite [unintelligible] [00:17:17] to that.

Jasper: And we estimate at that market Gap they are able to earn 1.1 billion dollars in reserve interest.  so basically [cross talk]

Grant: Investing in treasury bills as well correct? [cross talk]

Jasper: Correct.

Grant: Sort of the same ideology?

 

Jasper: It's literally the same model. So by virtue of the business world, they have a money printer pretty much.  

Jeff: Yep.

Jasper: And all that goes through their team and the shareholders, so it's honestly a brilliant business, and what we're doing is kind of the same thing, but instead of the money going to shareholders, it goes to people in extreme poverty. 

So, hopefully, one day we’ll be as big as Circle because that will mean that at that 1.1 billion per year. We estimate we would be lifting two and a half million people out of poverty, so that's by no means enough to end extreme poverty, but I would be proud if we would get there.

Jeff: Jasper's like getting to the market cap of USDC circle stablecoin, that gets us to a huge impact but, the size of the market per money is massive, so the potential to solve extreme poverty, 

we think the stablecoin is one of those avenues that gets us to that potential. If we can move into 500  billion of market cap, think of how much could be generated From an interest-earning Reserve that supports a stablecoin like that. 

So, it's the potential of this Market that gets us really excited and that's why we talk about these huge numbers and the big vision of ending extreme poverty, because of the potential there it's a big enough market to where I can potentially happen.

grant: the compounding effect is what’s really powerful because the more people that want to get involved Place their assets in Glo, and just let it sit there, just like you said, just like a bank account. 

You can still use it, however, you want to use it. While you're walking around, while you're sleeping, it is actually helping people around the world get out of extreme poverty. 

It’s powerful. I think once it clicks, and people kind of understand what happens in the back, and how it works, it's a very powerful compounding effect as more people get involved.

Jasper: I like what you're saying. As you're walking around and as you're sleeping. That sounds a lot like passive income, right, which is also this elusive. [crosstalk] 

Grant: Passive impact, yeah.   

Jasper: We've been calling it passive income, passive philanthropy, which is a form of being charitable that doesn't cost you money or time.

Grant: Was the partnership with GiveDirectly a formal partnership, or is that just, hey we see what they're doing, and they're doing a great job? We’re just going to send them the money and then obviously it just comes in as donations to them.

Jasper: That's good to mention. We have no formal partnership. We're in touch with them and they know that we exist and they're excited to see what will come out of it, but I don't know if you know this term, but people in the crypto world like to use the word “permission-less”, 

and in a way, we are sort of permissionlessly building on top of GiveDirectly. We're just going to send the money. Another term people in the crypto world like to use is money “Lego”. So, platforms building on top of each other.

Grant: [00:20:35] Yep.

Jasper: So in a way, GiveDirectly is the money Lego brick, and we're putting another brick on top of them and they don't have any formal thing to do with that, which is, I think quite funny actually.

Grant: What did you think about GiveDirectly because there's a…  you know even with anything in philanthropy, just like anything in crypto, ironically there's going to be people who like it, and people who don't like it for whatever reasons they might have. What was the decision to go with GiveDirectly versus another institution that gives money?

Jeff: First thing I want to mention is the thoughts around why basic income? Why cash transfers? It goes back to extreme poverty too, and what's needed to help solve that problem. 

GiveDirectly has shown and has many years of showing the impact of cash transfers, so they do a lot of really good research in the areas they operate. They’re on the ground, actually making the transfers, 

doing all the processes making sure the right people get it, and all those things.  So, they’re tracking it, and they have impacts there. I also like the idea that giving people money lets them choose how best to use that type of giving, 

rather than that top-down approach of, “you need this, we think this is best for you,” and that type of thing. So, that's fundamentally a less controversial Type of giving, and there’s still arguments around, “is this the best use of funds?” 

and all those things, but fundamentally it's a huge problem. It's UN SDG number one, and GiveDirectly is doing a very good job of it. 

GiveDirectly is not the only NGO or nonprofit doing this, but it's the one that has the capability and the capacity to do it right now, and it's showing a really good job of making it work.

Grant: Just too piggyback real quick. Extreme poverty is defined by persons living on less than $2 a day I think?

Jeff: $2.15. Yep.

Grant: $2.15, yeah, so $2.15, and looking at the issue right and the problem It's obviously immense. But in the early days, or even now when you speak to…  have you spoken to governments? 

Have you spoken to major nonprofits to get their response? Because I think we need to get everybody involved right? specifically those two areas of society. I think people will do what they want. 

I think you will see [unintelligible] [00:22:53] of people Wanting to buy Glo and be a part of this, but at the end of the day, we still need everybody to play some part. 

Have there been some conversations with the UN or other big organizations, local governments at the state level or federal level, at the International level, or whatever it may be? Have you had conversations? What have those been like? 

Jeff: I'm trying to think. We haven't had high-level conversations with people in government, but we've had meetings with people who are kind of on the ground and working in these organizations and it's all been really positive. 

I don't have any specifics on the outcomes of conversations like that. Obviously, we're just getting started, and our leverage and impact on that is not as significant as other big organizations, 

but GiveDirectly is definitely in conversations with those organizations and making sure the money they’re donating as cash transfers and using in certain areas; they have a really good due diligence process, 

and they work with governments to make sure everything is working there. And as we look forward in getting Partnerships, and thinking who are the right types of people to help leverage this idea, 

governments will be important, but it will also be for-profit large corporations, they’ll be big players in the crypto space, it'll be people that are going to help us scale this idea, 

and really provide some support around it, because we are creating a new form of money and there are market dynamics and network effects around adoption. All those things are built into a strategy to get this thing launched and really scaled, so it's important. 

Once there’s Civic and impact, we have high-level conversations, we’ll make sure we're doing things the right way, and we want to have everybody aligned in terms of the impact we're giving.

Jasper: That’s good to stipulate. Like Jeff said, we're just getting started. We're a very small team right now, 11 people and in all honesty we are, if this word makes sense, piggybacking at this moment on the Judgment calls of GiveDirectly, and the underground work that they do. 

Their government relationships, their infrastructure in terms of payments, they are actually doing the heavy lifting there.  At this point, we are only focused on Creating this second income stream for them.

 And from my experience, I also think we’ll definitely have these conversations, but right now we're so small we haven't even launched. I don't think we would make for a very meaningful voice at the table yet. 

I did see a documentary about GiveDirectly just a couple of weeks ago which was interesting because it was a documentary that really showed both sides. It definitely showed the positive impact, 

but it also has some critical notes, like shouldn't governments actually be doing this? They show a couple of painful effects, like what if two Villages are neighboring and then one Village does get the income, but the other doesn't get it yet? 

It's by no means perfect, but what I got from that documentary is mostly that in general, more money is a good thing because then, perhaps this other Village can get an income, because now they don't have to select. That's what we're focusing on right now.

Grant: [00:26:05] What is the road map right now? How can people or companies participate right now or when will they be able to? And then talk a little bit about that road map for 2023.

Jasper: It's actually an exciting week to ask that question, and this week we are finally doing our soft launch, which means that we are going to test onboarding our first customers. 

So, we've been building a platform where if you have a corporation, you can create an account. You can send us money and then you get Glo dollars, and that was quite some technical, but also legal work and we're finally there, so we're going to test that out with one company. 

If that all works well then, we hope to do our actual launch early next year. However, unfortunately, we then still won't be able to sell Glo to individuals, because that is legally quite difficult, 

so what we're going to do instead is what most cryptocurrencies do is we sell it in large amounts to a crypto exchange. So those are companies like Binance, Kraken, and Coinbase, those are crypto exchanges. 

We sell the Glo to them, and if you’re an individual and you want to get Glo dollars, you don't buy from us directly, But, you buy them at your favorite crypto Exchange. That timing is a little dependent on how quickly we can get those Partnerships going. 

We’re definitely having good conversations. unfortunately, due to events, you're probably aware of. Exchanges have…  They're also busy doing some other things right now [crosstalk].

Jeff: They're under a bit of pressure.

Jasper: But if it all goes well then individuals should be able to buy Glo dollars very early next year. And then what we're going to do throughout the rest of the year are two things. 

We’re going to create a nice dashboard that shows if you own Glo dollars. What is the impact you're having, how much money you've generated, and how many people have you been lifting out of poverty. 

Perhaps showing you some ways to increase that number. Maybe you can invite friends, family, things like that. And the other thing that we're going to try to work on is giving this cryptocurrency some utility. 

And that's basically jargon for making sure that it’s actually a useful form of money. So in the beginning of Glo dollars, you can buy them, you can sell them, but there's no shop that will accept them as payment,

 but that is a future we want to work towards, that you could actually buy your milk with Glo dollars and receive your salary in the form of Glo dollars and that is going to require us to partner with payroll companies, card issuers, or banks, or payment platforms, and that's what we're going to work on over the course of next year.

Jeff: And for the crypto folks that are listening. Early access will be on DeFi, decentralized exchanges as well, so there's this process of getting to a place where a lot of people have access to it through the centralized exchanges, listing as many as we can, but on the DeFi, Like the Uniswap, We hope to have that listed in early 2023 as well. So, if you're into those things, we'll make sure we'll let you know when it's available to actually purchase there as well.

Grant: Even in that sort of first instance through DeFi exchanges it will still act like it normally would on [ unintelligible]  00:29:47].  You will still get the money and then that money will still go to people in extreme poverty correct?

Jeff: Think of it as any outstanding supply of Glo is benefiting commission, generating income. It’s the market cap growth, which leads to higher Reserve assets supporting as collateral. 

So, you buying on Uniswap, creating demand, and you holding Glo in a wallet means that there are reserves supporting that and it's going to be generating interest income. 

When Jasper mentioned corporations coming to our Platform, basically entities, initially US-based entities will be able to actually create an account mint issue the Glo. 

Change actual dollars for Glo, and then the general public individuals will hopefully have access points to actually buy it through exchanges, and DeFi protocols, and those types of things.

Grant: [00:30:41] I want to end with a couple of questions here. The first would be, as you go out and conversate, promote Glo, and talk to different people, whether it's in the crypto industry or outside of the crypto industry. 

Have conversations been a little bit more difficult to have with companies censored at the FTX collapse, and all the Domino effects that happen with that? 

Have conversations been a little bit more difficult in this time as crypto’s growing through a bit of a, I actually think a positive time, in its history? But do you see conversations maybe with companies or just prior people that you were discussing before something like that happens,

 and now they're reassessing and don’t want to be involved in crypto or anything at all like that? Have those conversations happened? Has it been difficult to on board as quickly as you thought it might be with some organizations or some companies?

Jasper: We definitely don't get the benefit of the doubt anymore. That already wasn't the case. Being crypto already makes people suspicious by default, but now even more than then, it's on us to build trust. 

We do experience that if we actually talk to someone and have some time to have a conversation to explain what we're doing, why we're doing it, what the potential impact is, and why we're using crypto. 

And then have a two-sided conversation where someone then comes with questions and concerns and we answer them, then almost always, we get to a point where the other person leaves the conversation thinking okay, this is a good idea and I want to be a part of this. 

Unfortunately, sometimes you don't get that conversation right. You're on social media, someone is just reading one of your tweets, or just browsing very quickly through your website and then coming to a conclusion. 

Then by default People just assume that this is some kind of get-rich-quick scheme, or even worse. So we have to do the work to build trust definitely.

Jeff: But what's good about the recent events is when we ask potential partners, can you show us proof of reserves? We expect you to ask that whereas, we don’t… let us operate by ourselves. 

That's really important. I think the ecosystem is going to become stronger, but it's also important, like Jasper said, we have to make sure people understand. Glo is as much different than Terra Luna. 

It's like both Terra USD was a stablecoin and we’re calling ourselves a stablecoin. There's a problem there.  It's a totally different mechanism, a totally different type of backing. Ours is very very low risk, relative to tear USD. So, clearing up how we use these terms. 

Even the term crypto, I mentioned, represents a lot of things. Some people think of it as speculative, so blockchain money, blockchain fully backed 100% reserved money, 

that's what we need to really push out there, and the mission is the important aspect of getting people into this movement because it's how do we think about this blockchain fully backed trusted money in a new way to actually want to participate and support a Cause.

Grant: I want to end a little bit on the future, and I know it can be tough just starting out. There's a lot of moving parts. There's a lot of different, you know, every day is a win, right? Every week there's wins and losses, but as you look 3 to 5 years down the road, what does success look like for you and the team, and Glo being in the ecosystem, and being in the world impacting lives? What does success look like?

Jasper: For me, I would be very happy to get to the point where the general public sees Glo as just another form of money that they can use in their daily lives. Basically, everyone knows that if you care about extreme poverty as a cause area then using the Glo dollar, rather than the US dollar is one of the main things you can do to make a step in the right direction.

 Kind of analogous to, it's a bit of a weird analogy, but kind of analogous to everyone knows that if you care about Animal Welfare then the thing to do is to eat less meat. If you care about extreme poverty, then the thing to do is try to use the Glo Dollar in your daily life as money.

Jeff: [00:35:12] To add to that, in 3 to 5 years,  where this really takes off and gets Network effects and grows substantially, like billions and billions of market cap, 

something that's used all over the world is when companies accepted it. When DeFi protocols denominate their products and Glo. When payment apps make Glo the back and sediment layer. 

All these things were money is just used, there's no reason it can't be this BlockChain embedded philanthropy type of money, and we're already seeing companies like Stripe use stablecoins in their business models, 

so we want Glo to… anywhere money is touched, and this provides transfer of value. Blockchains are becoming scalable. The technology is trusted. 

All these things are important to getting lots of adoptions, so there's two sides of it, infrastructure, companies adopting payment apps, and then people really pushing for like, okay why not money? Why can't money represent something more than just what we traditionally think of as a transfer value?

Grant: Right, if you get into all these different layers, the compound effect of the impact really starts to become eye-opening. As far as really changing the environments on the ground for people living in extreme poverty, then it can get really interesting on how things go from there. 

So, it's quite powerful and innovative. It's like you said, it's the trust factor. It's going to be Paramount as Glo moves forward and that's, I think, welcoming that challenge of building that trust. 

Building the technology in the ecosystem; building those transparency layers. Whether it's the logins to show impact on a retail level for a person, or a company is looking at ways they can give back passively is super interesting, 

because all of a sudden their budgets, they don't have to,  they can use some of their philanthropy budgets for other things to help grow their business so there is an interesting aspect of the passive philanthropy being put into work in the world as you see how people could use. It could get really interesting.

Jeff: We'd love to see it on balance sheets and companies say hey we have X on our balance sheet as liquid capital for our business, and it's generating X amount of dollars that lift  X amount of people out of poverty, so it’s a great story, and I really hope we can scale this to make it really appealing to people.

Jasper: If I may, I'd like to make it a little actionable for anyone who's listening. If someone who’s hearing this is excited or inspired we're really creating a new and honestly a little bit of a weird form of philanthropy that, 

like you said, once it clicks it’s such a no-brainer, but because it's so new it takes a while before Eclipse would most people. We’re looking for this first group of adopters. Really the earlier doctors who click with what we're doing and want to set the right example by pioneering the usage of the Glo dollar. 

Any movement needs first movers, so if someone is listening and is like hey, I want to help them out just by doing this, we're probably going to launch a page, glodollar.org/dfg, so that's for destructors for good [chuckles] where you can sign up for the waitlist to buy Glo. 

I'll be honest that doesn't really do anything except help us show demand, helping us show that there is a group of people that is willing to start this movement. And that will be the world to us, because that might just Inspire the next person to do the same thing and then perhaps a company to start accepting Glo, and that's how this thing we'll start out.

Grant:  It’s pretty amazing. I'll link everything below just so people can find out all the information. I'll point people to your FAQs and everything, so they can do their own diligence and look over this stuff, but I think you guys did a great job of sort of simplifying it, and showing what $100 can do, or $1,000 can do. 

I just think just putting the basic math there of how the treasury bills work and simple interest rates. It can be Simplified pretty clearly to where we can disregard all the complicated stuff that sometimes, perhaps, blockchains bring to people and they don't want to deal with it. 

I think you've done a great job so far simplifying what $100 does, what $1,000 does. And again it's not a donation so that people don't give away their money. They could still be philosophic and give back, and I think that allows people who, perhaps, traditionally don't have the means to give back, but really want to give back. 

I think there's a massive set of the population that wants to be philanthropic, but it's usually difficult to do that when you don't necessarily have the funds that some people do that can donate $5, $10 grand, or even $1,000. 

So, the aspect that you don't necessarily have to donate, and give your money away to have an impact, I think is a powerful motivating factor for people across all economic scales to take it back now.

Jeff: [00:40:46] Exactly, and that's how this scales. If people are using it as money. Relying on donations for extreme poverty isn't going to get us there. There has to be this passive philanthropy, embedded philanthropy type of product, and we think this is a really good starting point.

Grant: Amazing. Thanks, Jasper. Thanks, Jeffrey. This has been an awesome conversation. I think hopefully we'd love to have you back on. Maybe this time at the end of the next year, and see what progress has been made, and maybe we can get a couple of people involved in maybe a little round table discussion on maybe giving back, and new ways of doing so. 

I think that's a conversation that's a little bit under the radar. There’s so much technology that does incredible things yet sort of this really really foundational level of extreme poverty and extreme hunger. 

We have yet to see Innovative technology work for those individuals around the world, so I think anytime that Innovation can really seep into the other billion around the world sort of living in extreme conditions, that's sort of the last mile so to speak of doing some really powerful things. So thanks for taking the time. 

Thanks for putting in the work and continuing the day-to-day challenge of building something potentially great so congrats to you and the team and best of luck to next year.

Jeff: Thanks so much. I really appreciate being on the show

Jasper: Thanks a lot. Yes, great conversation and that would be great to be back in a year and discuss some of these topics.

[00:42:17] [END OF AUDIO]

Latest media appearances

Appearances on podcasts, talks, external articles

Dec 15, 2023
Podcast Video

Crypto for Good: How Blockchain Can End Extreme Poverty

Jeff and Violetta discuss why we focus on extreme poverty, our ecosystem partners, GiveDirectly, doubts around UBI, what's needed to end extreme poverty, and much more.
About Glo
Stablecoins
35 minutes
Nov 22, 2023
Podcast Video

Web3 Academy: Can a stablecoin end extreme poverty?

"In this episode we talk about Glo, revolutionary project that turns profits into a force for good, fighting global poverty with every holder's contribution."
About Glo
Philanthropy
44 minutes
Oct 31, 2023
Podcast Audio

Glo and The Life You Can Save on Crypto Altruism

How can crypto help to fight extreme poverty, how can blockchain fuel smarter giving, and what are the barriers preventing crypto from reaching its full potential.
About Glo
Philanthropy
45 minutes
Oct 23, 2023
External Article

Jeff on Topl's Spotlight

In Topl Spotlight #25, Jeff talks about Glo's challenges, how we're working towards ending extreme poverty, other exciting DeFi projects, and much more.
About Glo
Blockchain
DeFi
7 minutes
Oct 17, 2023
Podcast Audio

How to compete with giant stablecoins like Tether and Circle

Jasper joins Herbert Blankesteijn on the Dutch BNR's Cryptocast, to talk about competing with Circle and Tether, and how we could use stablecoins for good.
Stablecoins
About Glo
50 minutes
Sep 12, 2023
Talks

Garm's talk at DappCon

In this talk, Garm shares why Glo Dollar should be the stablecoin of choice, even if you don't care about ending extreme poverty.
About Glo
22 minutes
Apr 14, 2023
External Article

Crypto for Good: How Glo plans to use a stablecoin to help end extreme poverty

Matthew Leising shares his take on Glo Dollar.
About Glo
Philanthropy
3 minutes
Mar 7, 2023
Podcast Audio

Fighting extreme poverty with web3 and stablecoins

On the Crypto Altruism podcast, Jasper and Garm join Drew Simon to talk about web3-enabled basic income, the mechanics behind Glo, and DAOs.
Philanthropy
Stablecoins
44 minutes
Mar 6, 2023
Talks

Jasper's talk at ETHDenver

In this 17 min talk at ETHDenver, Jasper takes us through the kinda bullish and the hyper bullish case for Glo.
Blockchain
DeFi
17 minutes
Mar 3, 2023
Podcast Video

Ending poverty with crypto: the rise of Glo

In the Blockster podcast, Jeff and Jasper talk about our model, how Glo will ensure to keep its peg, the protocols followed to ensure security, and more.
Blockchain
Stablecoins
41 minutes
Feb 26, 2023
Podcast Video

Glo Dollar and extreme poverty

Garm and Jasper join Martin Skadal to talk about how Glo works, our next steps, security, donation-based philanthropy, and more.
Philanthropy
Social impact
55 minutes
Feb 16, 2023
Podcast Video

0 Extreme Poverty, with Kevin Owocki

Jasper and Garm join Kevin Owocki on the Green Pill podcast to discuss embedded philanthropy, our tech, poverty to zero, the reserve model, and more.
DeFi
Public goods
39 minutes
Feb 15, 2023
Podcast Audio

A solution to extreme poverty?

About all things nonprofits and solving extreme poverty
Public goods
Social impact
33 minutes
Feb 10, 2023
Podcast Audio

How stablecoin Glo lifts people out of poverty

Jasper joins Joeri from the CMO Stories podcast. They discuss the purpose of Glo, ownership in Glo, our marketing strategy, how DAOs work, and more.
DeFi
Stablecoins
27 minutes
Jan 3, 2023
Podcast Audio

Glo Dollar and the benefits of stablecoins for charity

In this podcast episode, Jeff and Seth speak about the benefits of stablecoins for charity, and elaborate on our giving to GiveDirectly.
Stablecoins
Blockchain
32 minutes
Dec 22, 2022
Podcast Audio

Embedding philanthropy in money with Glo

Jeff and Jasper join Nina Cerar from The Blockchain Recorded Podcast about ""Embedding philanthropy in money with Glo".
Blockchain
Philanthropy
58 minutes
Dec 20, 2022
Talks

Glo; the stablecoin that lets any project reduce extreme poverty

In this Infura Community Call, Jasper explains how developers can make anything they're building on Web3 more impactful by using Glo.
Stablecoins
Social impact
10 minutes
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