In 2016 Griff Green and his partner Jordi Baylina put their heads together to decide on their next blockchain adventure. They went big.

“As cryptoanarchists, if we want to overthrow governments, what do we want to replace them with?” Green said to me recently from the Giveth.io office in Costa Rica. That’s the non-profit-disrupting startup he and Baylina created, and as we spoke we had to pause our conversation to let the pounding rain pass.

Green is without a doubt one of the most intriguing, generous and fascinating people in all of web3; he was designing decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) when they were still called decentralized autonomous corporations (DACs); he was one of the first employees at Slock.it, the infamous designer of the DAO. For many years he’s led a decentralized education camp at Burning Man. The DAO of course was hacked for $55 million in 2016 where Green played a pivotal role in resolving the attack.

He was only getting started.

Regarding the overthrow of governments, Green is not advocating violence of any means but rather doing something about the fact that governments often fail their citizens in myriad ways.

“So we have to assess, ’what is it governments do?’” he said. After that, Giveth wants to “build something that does that better,” he said. “It’s not a revolution, it’s an evolution, and things can be peaceful and easy.”

Six years ago both Green and Baylina played major roles in how the Ethereum community responded to, and overcame, the $55 million DAO hack (there’s a book.) Baylina had also been supporting the Catalonia freedom movement in Spain, which Green is aligned with as well.

“So we brainstormed, how do we do this without being assassinated?” Green said. Helping people seemed a safe bet, and they both knew that when governments fail charities often step in to help fill the need. “No one is going to assassinate the guy who’s helping orphans,” Green said.

Giveth’s web site

And so Giveth was born, which bills itself as “leading the decentralized altruistic community.” As seen in many web3 startups, Giveth is taking a well-known model – charitable giving to support non-profits – and turning it on its head. They’re doing this by incentivizing individuals by rewarding them for donations in the form of crypto tokens and encouraging them to rethink the top-down approach of grant-based philanthropy.

Giveth’s goal is lofty – create competing micro-economies based on crypto and DAOs that can take care of local needs like cleaning a river or building orphanages. Green stressed the competition part as a vital part of what could make this work.

“Giveth is going to create a path for that to start up,” Green said. “The people on the ground actually decide what they want and there’s a path for being rewarded for doing it. It’s the difference between a movie theater and a movie in a park. The movie in the park you can’t sell tickets to but it creates a lot of value for society,’’ he said. “It shouldn’t have to run off of donations.”

Not all government services are bad, of course. But there’s certainly room for improvement, Green told me. By creating a model where a donor can basically monetize their giving like never before, non-profits could adopt sustainable structures that are less dependent on those same donors.

“So we brainstormed, how do we do this without being assassinated?”

The token GIV is a key element to this approach. It’s given to donors of verified project on the Giveth platform, or it’s given to reward good work for the Giveth community, Green said. On secondary markets, GIV is worth about 12 cents at the moment (it was as high as about 71 cents in January), according to CoinMarketCap. A project to feed homeless indigenous people in British Columbia, Canada has raised over $129,000 on Giveth, and a blockchain-based way to give to help people in Ukraine has collected about $45,000.

The tokens can also be used to support projects on Giveth through staking – the more GIV a project has the more it can generate through a rewards system.

Green thinks of GIV as shares in the Giveth community and knows the path they’re on is hard and hasn’t been done before, so it could fail. But like his forays to Burning Man each year, he’s content to bring people in slowly to these ideas.

Read more: My Trip Down the Crypto Rabbit Hole in Search of the DAO Hacker

The second prong in the Giveth model is convincing people who work for non-profits to instead convert them into DAOs. In theory, a DAO is managed by a large, distributed group of people who – through their native DAO coins -- control its treasury and make decisions about whatever mission it’s focused on. They can be hard to establish, however, and tend to be run by less than 10 percent of members on a day-to-day basis.

They do though offer a flatter and more nimble structure than traditional non-profits. The integration of the token can bind a community too, certainly if they’re all getting rich from their efforts.  

“The battle is how do we teach normal non-profit people how to DAO?” Green said. “It’s a step-by-step thing. You change one thing at a time, slowly.”

While there is no clear path on how to upend charitable giving, Green pointed out that both Bitcoin and Ethereum used token issuance to create value for society. Can non-profits follow suit?

 “That’s the big leap,” he said. “If they can tokenize, and decentralize and use a reputation system to govern their donations successfully, then we take the next step and we issue them an economy.”

That last part is going to have to wait for a future story. But don’t worry, Green’s not going anywhere.