Universal Basic Income, while a timely topic, isn’t novel. It was first theorized in the 1800s, although there has been little innovation since. Yet with major technological shifts coming to a head, UBI has become an increasingly urgent conversation. 

Anna Stone, the Director of GoodDollar, a non-profit crypto UBI protocol, sees a future with many models – some global, some regional. “This is not a winner takes all category,” Stone said to me recently. “We need to be experimenting across multiple approaches.” 

Experimentation was the inspiration for GoodDollar, which started as a financial inclusion research initiative – the corporate responsibility program for the social multi-asset platform eToro.

The protocol is in its early stages and potential investors or users should familiarize themselves with how it works. GoodDollar has a digital coin that’s created when investors stake the stablecoin DAI and earn interest payments based on the amount they pledge. Those investors are paid the interest and the coin, which should have a value in the broader coin market, is distributed to users, making up the UBI portion of the deal. 

The GoodDollar token isn’t offered on exchanges right now. According to the company’s own metrics, its value is $0.00018. The total amount of GoodDollar coins is capped at 2.2 trillion.

GoodDollar joins other crypto projects like Glo Dollar, which is a stablecoin that’s hoping to ease extreme poverty by donating all of its interest income to the charity GiveDirectly that will then in turn distribute the money to those in extreme poverty.

Read more: Crypto for Good: How Glo Dollar Plans to Use a Stablecoin to Help End Extreme Poverty

About $425,000 worth of GoodDollar UBI has been distributed to over half a million users to date. The top countries include Bangladesh, Indonesia, Nigeria, Vietnam, India and Brazil. 

eToro, founded in 2006, is a combination of Robinhood and Coinbase, Stone said. It was the first platform where people in Europe and Australia could buy crypto, and it continues to play an important role in the digital assets world.  

Yoni Assia, eToro’s chief executive officer, was an early blockchain believer. As a company, they came to the consensus that if they’re committed to opening capital markets around the world, they need to reach the people that eToro can’t serve as a regulated platform. 

GoodDollar, in part, was designed to help bring new users into web3. The project aimed to answer three questions: How can anyone who has access to the Internet obtain a digital wallet? How can we distribute crypto for free that enables people to learn by doing? And how do we recreate an ecosystem that sustainably does this at scale? 

Stone believes people shouldn’t be using their investment assets to explore and experiment with new technologies. She continues to be blown away by the ingenious innovation where people are using GoodDollar as a stand-alone or complementary currency in a local market. 

For example, a woman in Brazil, Christiane, started a range of community stores in a favela, where people buy and sell food, clothing and handiwork, all using GoodDollar. 

“She’s created this local community economy based off of our global currency infrastructure,” Stone said. “But because it’s permissionless, decentralized and open, she can get anyone to sign up for GoodDollar, and start to claim it, own it and shop. It creates this positive cycle.”  

While most UBI projects in the past have been rolled out in a centralized, localized way, GoodDollar wanted to try something different.

“It’s not that UBI is a challenging concept, it’s a politically impossible concept,” Stone said. “Our approach was to prove something that hasn’t been done within a global context and not with a set dollar amount. GoodDollar is based more on the philosophy of Bitcoin, where it’s an open model and we can see where the value accumulates.” 

Stone is happy to see the UBI conversation being pushed into the mainstream. 

“It’s no accident that Sam Altman has two companies: an AI company, OpenAI, and a UBI company, Worldcoin,” she said. “The spotlight on Worldcoin is bright as a high-profile, venture-funded, for-profit effort. It will kick-off experimentation around the range of UBI models we’re going to see. Until now, there’s been a real lack of exploration of UBI.”

Although UBI pilots are being pushed at the state level in the U.S., Stone said the government isn’t set up to administer money to individuals at scale. “Think about existing social services or the Covid pandemic relief. They’re really archaic systems. It’s quite obvious that private sector players are going to get there faster and build the tooling that’s required,” Stone believes. 

Big private players like Worldcoin aren’t without their critiques. Most notably, the contentious issues relating to biometric data privacy. Stone is more interested in the role of the private investor. 

“Very little has been shared about the digital currency Worldcoin proposes and its monetary policy - if the investors own 20 percent of this global currency supply, does this mean they’re the new corporate overlords of this system?” she said. “We need to ask ourselves, is this progress or a perversion of late-stage capitalism? Is this a step towards a more inclusive and supportive system above what we have today?” 

Stone believes what Worldcoin got right is that the proof-of-personhood should be a public protocol that’s not owned by any one company. “If you’re trying to create a standard around digital ID, it needs to be open-source, transparent, auditable, usable and not owned by anyone. There are critical parts of this that are going to define what is public infrastructure versus what is private infrastructure – and where does value and capital accumulate between those two polls.”