Announcing LaborDAO Crowdfund Launch : ethereum

Hello Ethereum fam,

We have launched a Mirror Crowdfund campaign in honor of International Workers’ Day in order to allow the LaborDAO community to take part in funding the LaborDAO Treasury as is common practice in Web3 projects. 

https://twitter.com/thelabordao/status/1520842093412950016?s=20&t=Ep1biqA7f0pd0CdUtJV1ug

Our crowdfund launched(May Day) at 3:00pm EST/ 10:30pm Thursday, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). 

The LaborDAO Mirror Crowdfund campaign fund will be used in a number of concrete ways, including building a treasury, building a demo of the LaborDAO DeFi protocol, and paying our artists and contributors in the coming months.

We have heard from our community members – and know from our own experience – that the topic of worker organizing is a sensitive one that requires care and precision. For those reasons we are building with intention and at the speed of trust as we buildLaborDAO. 

As organizers, artists, activists, researchers, developers, labor lawyers and more, we understand the challenges of fundraising through traditional financing methods. We are fundraising in a decentralized manner because we are driven to support the everyday people who are most affected by labor issues.

We’re working with artist Billy Buntin to drop a series of LaborDAO NFTs that will serve as identification and help us airdrop to early contributors and supporters once the DAO is up and running. All contributors will receive access to the LaborDAO’s private Discord chat channel that will be launched later in May.

The Top 3 Crowdfund contributors will receive one of three NFTs from Billy Buntin. His artwork has been designed to honor three groups of workers who have been severely impacted and organized through the pandemic: nurses, baristas and office workers.

***LaborDAO DeFi Protocol ***

Workers have always suffered the brunt of the weight from financial crisis caused by the abuses of Wall Street.

DeFi is a revolutionary tool that solves problems created by Traditional Finance (TradFi) and takes power from Wall Street putting it in the hands of ordinary people. There currently aren’t any Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols that are using a share of their profits to support worker struggles. This is an incredibly important experiment that can tip the balance of power back to workers.

We intend to create a responsible DeFi project that reflects the most serious and respected projects in the Ethereum ecosystem. The protocol will allow users to grow funds while supporting the Labor Movement and will in turn allow workers to use DeFi as a sustainable source of revenue.

A portion of the revenue generated by the protocol will be used to support our Solidarity Fund.  That means that using our protocol, you will be funding workers who want to strike and organize.

Our plan for the LaborDAO DeFi Protocol development goals include:

1. Creating smart contracts, Treasury, multi-sig wallets and more

2. Hiring developers to build smart contracts for LaborDAO

3. Research on existing lending protocols including AAVE, MakerDAO and Compound

4. Create governance and delegate system

The crowdfund will end June 1, Wednesday at 3pm EST/ 1AM (UTC).