Ribon is a digital donation experience platform that has enabled more than 10 million donations to its users over the past four years. During this time, our main objective was to place donations in people’s routines in an accessible, transparent, and sustainable way.

Accessible: because we believe that everyone needs to experience the feeling of helping others so that giving becomes cultural.

Transparent: because the donor needs to be sure that their donation has actually arrived in the hands of those who need it.

Sustainable: because the platform needs to generate the necessary resources for its maintenance and growth.

Although Ribon has already incorporated these qualities at a certain point, the idea that decentralization would simultaneously enhance the accessible, transparent and sustainable character of our product has always been in the company’s DNA.

To understand how this can actually happen, let’s understand separately how decentralization can optimize each of these qualities within Ribon:

Decentralize to be more accessible

Decentralized platforms often publish their code openly so that everyone can see and replicate it in different ways. By doing this, we make our technology available so that other platforms can integrate it into their usage flow. 

For example, a meditation app will be able to integrate the Ribon experience so its users make a donation whenever they complete a daily meditation.

This kind of openness will be our biggest growth engine because that way we can access thousands of people without them even having to know Ribon. And the best part is that our experience will be inserted in moments that are already part of people’s routine, which helps them to develop the habit of donating recurrently.

Decentralize to be more transparent

In the digital environment, being transparent is being trustworthy. And the more reliable our experience is, the more donors we have.

Decentralized companies use the best technology available in terms of transparency in recording and storing data: blockchain technology. To understand the advantages of this technology, let’s compare our current data recording and storage process with a decentralized process using blockchain:

CurrentlyOn blockchain
Data is stored on a physical computer that belongs to a third-party company.Data is stored in files called Smart Contracts, that are immutable and do not belong to anyone
Only our team members can access our dataAnyone can access and audit our data
Data security depends on the third partyThe blockchain generated by the connection of Smart Contracts ensures data security
The validity of data depends on RibonThe community can audit and ensure data validity

Decentralize to be more sustainable

The giving market is worth more than $1.8 trillion each year. Paradoxically, there is no really big company operating in this field. This is because profiting from the donation market is still not well accepted in our society. The problem is that if nobody can make a profit, then nobody will work to develop innovative technologies. Dan Pallotta’s TED Talk explains very well how this logic has kept the donation market stagnant even today.

Well, the advantage of becoming a decentralized donation platform is that the profit generated by our technology no longer goes to the Ribon company, but to the entire community: donors, integrating companies, benefited projects, etc. 

Basically, everyone who contributes to the functioning and evolution of Ribon will receive the profits from their work through governance tokens, which act as shares of the company. This token will be built on blockchain technology and can be used as voting power in decision making within Ribon, or simply be sold on the market.

This means that the community will be rewarded in a way that is directly proportional to the evolution of Ribon, which places them as the most interested in this evolution. This growth format is much more sustainable and enables us to be a profitable and innovative company in the donation market.

Conclusion
This may seem like just a technology project, but our ultimate goal is much bigger than that. Ribon has helped more than 160,000 people through donations made on its platform – still centralized. If our decentralization really generates the growth we foresee, we can be creating the solution that will definitely put donations in people’s routine, bringing our impact to sufficient numbers to reach the eradication of extreme poverty by 2030.

If you are interested in this project and want to participate closely in our decentralization journey, join our Discord community. There we are publishing all the materials, exchanging references, and building the first prototypes of what we believe to be the donation platform of the future.