Impact staking products
Existing and upcoming products designed for impact stakers, INGOs and other organisations that are looking to run their own impact staking initiatives
Last updated
Existing and upcoming products designed for impact stakers, INGOs and other organisations that are looking to run their own impact staking initiatives
Last updated
Table of contents
Reach out via support@launchnodes.com to get started
Solo impact staking involves a donor running their own validator node on bare metal or public cloud and donating the Execution layer and Consensus Layer returns from that node over a 12-36 time period, making the data about the donation public and the data about the social impact being funded public.
We have experimented with UNICEF/ Giga looking at funding internet connectivity in schools. The instructions to set up a node on bare metal locally or to run a node on public cloud with videos and explanations can be found here as part of that work. Along with the staking returns donated so far and the custody pattern adopted.
Giga has lots of data in relation to mapping schools and the level of connectivity at those schools around the world. So funding schools broadband circuits and making available the uptime of those circuits and their relevant speeds is also important.
In this work part of the learning has been how to co-ordinate this work between multi-lateral organisations, government departments and a National ISP. All of this learning have been documented in the UNICEF GitHub repo.
We have established a model whereby a donor solo staker keeps their consensus layer returns but only donates their execution layer returns. This approach can work well for family offices or for-profit organisations that wish to combine for-profit staking with Impact staking.
GiveDirectly is a nonprofit that lets donors send money directly to the world’s poorest, no strings attached. In the last decade, GiveDirectly has delivered $700M+ to over 1.48 million people across fourteen countries. We currently have operations in DRC, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Morocco, Nigeria, Rwanda, Uganda, USA, & Yemen. (11 countries).
We have partnered with GiveDirectly to sign up solo stakers who want to use their impact staking by donating their Execution Layer returns, this entitles the impact staker a 50% discount on their node subscription with Launchnodes and provides a new source of revenue from staking to support GiveDirectly work in giving money to the poorest people.
Execution layer returns are not fixed or guaranteed. This experiment and partnership is something that will grow as more donors point more nodes execution layer returns towards GD and the data on it will be shared and open source, crucially the amount of execution layer returns earned and the money then donated to GiveDirectly’s outcomes.
Using our open-source pattern Ethereum Node operators, private investors, family offices and anybody who is running nodes can point execution layer returns to GiveDirectly or any social impact outcome they want to support.
Due to its status as a 501(c)(3)nonprofit organization, GiveDirectly does not endorse the products or services of any company.
At the core of this project is a smart contract which enables users to stake their ETH with Lido, while pledging a proportion of their overall staking rewards to one of the available Impact Staking projects.
The smart contract will enable users to:
Stake an amount of ETH
Determine a proportion (%) of their rewards that they are willing to donate to Impact Staking
Select one of the projects available in the Project Interface based on the staker’s personal interests (eg. funding internet connectivity for schools in Africa, reforestation of the rainforest etc.)
Determine the staker’s minimum time period for Impact Staking
It is recognised that a key attraction of staking through Lido is liquidity of funds. Stakers will be entitled to withdraw their stETH at any point, as described in the ‘Lido Impact Staking Smart Contract’ definition above.
Users will visit the User Interface, select the proportion of their rewards that they are happy to pledge ( x% ), the project that their rewards will fund, and potentially their minimum time period (3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 2 years).
The smart contract will be initiated in order to:
Stake the user’s ETH
Collect 100% of all rewards for the user received from Lido
Share x% of the rewards with the designated project
Send the remainder of the rewards (100%-x%) to the user’s wallet
Manage a request from the staker to unstake their staked tokens / exit the contract
The smart contract instance will be in existence until the user wishes to un-stake their ETH from this contract. If the user wishes to continue to stake their ETH beyond the life of the impact project, the user will receive all staking rewards - as if they were a typical Lido staker with no impact staking component. Alternatively, that user may select another impact project to share future rewards with.
Impact Staking - User Interface to Pledge Returns and View Impact
The web3 interface will allow users to select the project(s) they wish to support, the time period, and % of rewards they wish to pledge.
In addition to allowing users to stake their ETH and select their preferred project(s), a highly visual and impactful online dashboard will be created. This will show all ETH that has been impact staked to date, how much has been raised for each cause, the real-time impact of the project (eg. schools connected to the Internet, carbon savings achieved etc.)
The website will be easy to view and share, supporting ongoing awareness of the project via social and traditional media.
Impact Staking - Project Interface and Metrics
This web3 interface enables projects to list their projects, and to provide key
operational and performance metrics on an ongoing basis – enabling Impact Stakers
to determine how effective the projects are, compared to their intended goals and outcomes. Metrics will be project dependent, examples would be ‘number of trees planted’, ‘number of children connected to the internet’ etc.
If you want us to include your ideas and promote them here and in other forums or work with us please reach out with your area of interest and or your organisation's mandate and the use cases you are interested in. Non-technical partners are welcome and encouraged.
