The crowdfunding platform Kickstarter will launch a new company that will end up moving its website to a system based on the Celo blockchain.
In a Wednesday post, the CEO Aziz hasan and the co-founder Perry Chen said that Kickstarter will develop an open source protocol that will live on the Celo blockchain. The two executives cited the blockchain’s efforts to minimize its environmental impact (being carbon negative) in addition to being open source.
“We are entering an important time for alternative governance models, and we believe there is a significant opportunity to advance these efforts using the blockchain,” Chen and Hasan said.
Bloomberg reported that Kickstarter was planning to transition its website to the blockchain platform in 2022, and the project announced that it would publish a white paper “in the coming weeks.” Reportedly, Kickstarter said that the migration will not affect any of the millions of users currently using the platform for crowdfunding of projects that include medical and fitness products, artwork, books and movies.
Additionally, Kickstarter said it planned to establish a governance lab “overseeing the development of the governance of the protocol.” The CEO and co-founder of the Purpose Foundation, Camille Canon, will direct the effort.
With the emerging space of cryptocurrencies, some projects that could have received money through Kickstarter have become distributed autonomous organizations. In November, a group called ConstitutionDAO attempted to purchase a printed copy of the first edition of the United States Constitution, in which 17,437 backers received government tokens called PEOPLE. Although the DAO did not get the winning bid, the price of its token rose after the team behind the project allowed users to continue to hold the tokens.
Kickstarter, first released in 2009, reported that 21 million people have allocated more than USD 6,000 million to support 213,034 projects through the crowdfunding platform, including the Peloton bike and the 2014 movie Veronica Mars.
Keep reading: