Kickstarter to Fund and Adopt Decentralized Blockchain-Based Protocol

Yet, despite all the impressive numbers, there remains an endless line of talented and creative people waiting for opportunity. Our mission to help bring creative projects to life is a pledge to help unlock this latent potential in people and their ideas. To truly serve that mission, we need to build on what made Kickstarter so innovative in the first place: the power of a large network of people working together towards a common goal.

So, today we're announcing our commitment to a more open, collaborative, and decentralized future. As a first step, we're supporting the development of an open source protocol that will essentially create a decentralized version of Kickstarter's core functionality. This will live on a public blockchain, and be available for collaborators, independent contributors, and even Kickstarter competitors, from all over the world to build upon, connect to, or use. We think bringing all that we've learned about crowdfunding since 2009 to inform the development of a decentralized protocol will open up exciting new opportunities for creative projects to come to life. In the coming weeks, a white paper will be released outlining the technology and plans for the protocol.

In the spirit of decentralization, we're establishing an independent organization that will kick off the development of the protocol. Kickstarter PBC will provide this new independent organization with some funding, appoint an initial board, and commit to being one of the protocol's earliest clients, meaning Kickstarter.com will be built on top of the protocol. As a user, the Kickstarter experience you're familiar with will stay the same. You won't "see" the protocol, but you will benefit from its improvements.

In addition, we're establishing an independent governance lab. Initially, this lab will be committed to overseeing the development of the protocol governance. Along the way it will publish research, share learnings, and generally seek to develop governance resources for the commons through openly engaging with the notoriously challenging problems and critically important goals of good governance. We are entering a significant moment for alternative governance models, and we think there's an important opportunity to advance these efforts using the blockchain. This lab will be led by Camille Canon, co-founder and most recently executive director of Purpose Foundation (US), an organization focused on developing and scaling alternative ownership and governance models.

We've chosen Celo, an open source and carbon negative blockchain platform, as the best technology and community on which to build the protocol. We're inspired by the Celo ecosystem's thoughtful approach to building the technology they want to see in the world. Like the internet in the early 1990s, the blockchain is a nascent technology whose story is not yet written. Celo's efforts around minimizing environmental impact (and focus on global accessibility through mobile access to the blockchain), reminds us that the best way to get better systems is to build better systems.

Crowdfunding has largely faded from the public consciousness in recent years, and Kickstarter signaled to its venture capitalists that it wasn't the sort of hyper-growth startup they thought it was. (Kickstarter changed its designation in 2015 to a public benefit corporation and the next year took the unusual step of paying the startup's shareholders a dividend rather than reinvesting the money in pursuit of an initial public offering.)

Today, money that might have once gone to Kickstarter campaigns is flowing through blockchains into what are known as distributed autonomous organizations, or DAOs. Last month, a group dubbed ConstitutionDAO mounted a crowdfunding campaign to buy a rare copy of the U.S. Constitution. It raised $46.3 million from thousands of contributors but failed to win the auction. The DAO offered refunds and disbanded.

The embrace of crypto could help Kickstarter regain some relevance. A raft of startups, as well as companies over a century old, are searching for ways to decentralize their digital infrastructure, often in a bid to lower costs.

Crowdfunding has made it easier to fund creative work without the involvement of intermediaries and gatekeepers. At the same time, there should be better ways for creators to connect directly with their communities, and more tools available to help creative projects of all kinds and sizes come to life. Backers should be able to easily discover and participate more deeply in projects, better control their data, and have more robust tools to assess the trustworthiness and viability of a project.

That's why we're supporting the development of a decentralized crowdfunding protocol that will make it possible for people to launch and fund creative projects anywhere, whether it's on Kickstarter.com or someplace else on the web...

The protocol will live on Celo, a carbon-negative, public blockchain, be open source, and be available for collaborators, competitors, and independent contributors from all over the world to build upon, connect to, or use.

This openness enables everyone who is interested in the promise of crowdfunding to help build its future and have a say and stake in how it works. Blockchain will also open the potential to be rewarded for contributing to the systems that you use everyday...

Since everyone is invited to help contribute to the protocol and participate in the ecosystem, a wider array of good ideas will surface about how to transform crowdfunding for the better. As a result, more creative projects will ultimately find the tools and resources they need.