Fork the UN. It's time for Citizen DAO.

Citizen DAO exists to help & serve people. Think of Citizen DAO as a fork of the United Nations, something like “United Citizens.” We’re a new kind of public benefit organization on a mission to solve humanity's biggest challenges in health, housing, education, climate, governance, & finance.

Our philosophy:

1. Start with first principles
2. Solve root causes
3. Seek 10x improvements, not 10%
4. Design for abundance, not scarcity
5. Play the infinite game

We’re bold, ambitious, & ready to build the future we want.

This is our time. We're not asking for permission.

Key Takeaways

• Think of Citizen DAO as a fork of the United Nations, something like “United Citizens.” We’re creating a new kind of public benefit organization with the trust & transparency of Web3 at the core.
• We’re currently building Web3 solutions for funding NGOs: Impact Bonds, Funds, & Indexes. We’re starting with $Climate and $Health Bonds.
• Season 1 kicks off with a creative sprint & hackathon around designing solutions for health, housing, education, climate, finance, & governance problems.

The UN isn’t good enough

The United Nations is the only global protocol for coordinating public benefits. They have a monopoly on charging for world peace. There is no alternative.

The UN currently allows 193 of the 251 nations on earth to be members. It was formed in 1945 at the end of the Second World War with the purpose of delaying the Third World War.

Over the years, the UN started offering services such as reducing child hunger, slowing climate change, lowering global poverty, and financing countries. While noble, progress has stagnated for decades. We can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.

“Progress is stalled or reversed on inequalities, the rate of climate change, and the number of people going hungry.”

-UN Secretary-General, 2020

The United Nations operates a membership & bribe model. 193 nations pay ~$50B in annual membership dues for UN services regulated by the below entities:

Whether this is a “bug or a feature,” the United Nations influences the biggest areas of our lives. We believe the UN is a bottleneck for human advancement that throttles how fast we move forward.

What got us here won’t get us where we need to go. We need something ready for the coming explosion of exponential technologies on the horizon.

(We know most people working for the UN mean well and truly want to help people. We’re not criticizing them – we’re criticizing the bureaucratic machine they operate in.)

Enter Citizen DAO

Compared to the UN, Citizen DAO will offer better public benefits to nations for a cheaper price. We’re going to play a different game.

To be clear, we’re not naively saying we are replacing the UN. We aim to do what the UN can't and/or won’t do. They can stick to peacekeeping. We’ll take the rest.

Instead of being controlled by politicians representing only 193 nations, Citizen DAO is owned & controlled by citizens of humanity. We are the ones in charge. We’re building the public benefit organization we want & need.

What will Citizen DAO offer?

Since we’re a DAO, we’ll figure it out together during our “Season” format. Think of these seasons like a hybrid of company quarters (Q1, Q2, etc.) + software development sprints + TV show seasons. We’re building together & building in public.

“Solving humanity’s biggest problems one season at a time.” Netflix documentary, anyone?

Overall, Citizen DAO is on a mission to solve root causes of the problems we face in health, housing, education, climate, finance, governance, & security. We’re starting Season 1 with a focus on climate, health, & housing.

Each season consists of four phases: Define, Design, Develop, Deploy

Define: Research sprints for identifying & defining the problems we’re trying to solve. We’ll curate & analyze the latest data available for each category. We’ll interview numerous people to understand the real problems experienced in delivering impact.

Design: Creative sprints focused on designing solutions to solve the problems we identified & defined. Moonshot ideas are preferable. We will collaborate in Figma and GitHub to get ready for the next phase.

Develop: Software sprints focused on building the solutions we just designed. This phase will be like a traditional hackathon, but mixed with XPRIZE’s crowdsourced prize model. We all work out of the same open source GitHub repo making all code modular to create something like “Impact Legos.”

Deploy: Deployment & refinement of what we just built. By this time, we’ll have a solid network of NGOs, DAOs, & key stakeholders ready to implement our solutions.

That wraps up a season. We’ll learn, iterate, and continue with subsequent seasons until we solve our biggest problems. Apply here if you want to participate.

Saving the world requires better capital coordination, both human & financial.

While we’re coming up with cool ideas, we need money & a vast network of people to help deploy them. To do this, we’re partnering with NGOs for the delivery while also developing a better way to fund them. For the rest of this paper, we’ll use the term “NGOs” as the top level category of nonprofits delivering social impact.

NGO stands for “Non Governmental Organizations” and was created by the United Nations in 1945. It’s defined as “a nonprofit organization that operates independently of any government, typically one whose purpose is to address a social or political issue.”

~10 million NGOs operate globally and undertake a wide array of activities including helping the environment, delivering healthcare, serving women & children, providing water & food, and many other humanitarian services. If NGOs joined forces, they would make the 5th largest economy in the world. We’re building the Web3 financial platform to enable this.

NGOs are the only organizations focused on delivering positive social impact to people globally, yet we treat them as the opposite of startups solving moonshot problems. Why?

When a startup has an idea that people want to buy, investors flood them with money so they can hire the best talent and build the best products.

When an NGO has an idea that will serve the basic needs of people, they beg for donations and grants so they can attempt to deliver the social impact they’ve identified.

What are we optimizing for – Profit or People?

NGOs fund operations in three main ways:

1. Donations
2. Grants
3. Contracts

The problems with NGO funding:

1. Donations aren’t dependable. It’s hard to plan big projects because of the uncertainty of donations. Most NGOs are limited to only what they can do with the donations they may or may not receive.
2. Donations aren’t efficient. Estimates say only 25% of every donation actually makes it to the intended people in need. There are too many middlemen in this equation.
3. Grants constrain NGOs. Grants coming from top level organizations aren’t aligned with what needs to happen on the ground. This causes NGOs to “fit” their projects into the criteria set by the grant instead of focusing on what would make the biggest impact.
4. Contracts divert energy away from the real impact the NGO wants to deliver. The same as with grants, applying for & accepting contracts limits NGOs from doing the most important things.
5. Donors get frustrated with the lack of transparency behind their donations. They feel their donations don’t matter because they can’t see what is being done.

What’s the solution? Enter the Impact Protocol.

Similar to how startups have access to finance from the capital markets, we are building Web3 solutions to give NGOs access to finance from crypto markets.

It looks simple on the surface: We connect impact investors & donors directly to community NGOs. We empower both groups of people to brainstorm and share ideas. Think of this like “GoFundMe + YCombinator for NGOs” where people invest in projects they care about and can collaborate with. Our goal is to coordinate money & people better than existing solutions.

We’re calling this coordination layer the Impact Protocol. Its purpose is to deliver maximum positive social impact for the least amount of money in the shortest amount of time. We’re doing this by cutting out the unnecessary friction between donor/impact investor and the people in need. Then we incentivize maximum impact using game mechanics & cryptoeconomics.

The Impact Protocol powers Impact Bonds, Funds, Indexes.

• Impact Bonds: We’ve engineered a new way to deliver maximum impact via programmable money. While traditional bonds pay investors back in fiat, Impact Bonds yield CDAO (Citizen DAO governance tokens), index tokens, & sponsor tokens.
• Impact Funds: Think of these like decentralized venture funds focused on funding impact. Each fund is a Gnosis Safe (ex: Climate.CitizenDAO.eth) governed by Citizen DAO members. Each fund functions as a sub-DAO of Citizen DAO.
• Impact Indexes: When a cohort of projects are funded, the protocol mints an index token composed of those projects’ tokens. We’ll have various indexes representing impact themes like planting trees, providing medical care, providing clean water, feeding people, installing solar, etc.

Since we started building Impact Bonds first, we’ll use this as an example.

How Impact Bonds work: NGOs submit project proposals similar to a startup pitch. Citizen DAO members vote on which projects to fund.

One condition of funding is that the NGO must have their own token to represent the impact they deliver. Citizen DAO funds NGOs not like traditional VC or grant models, but by purchasing their token from a bonding curve. With traditional publicly traded companies, people speculate on future profit. With publicly traded NGOs, people speculate on impact. We believe this funding model is more sustainable than donations.

We fund NGOs across various lifecycle stages. Monthly milestones must be reached before funding is released. The protocol continues funding NGOs every month when on-chain milestones are reached. This is done by purchasing more of their project tokens via a bonding curve.

This is an example of our $Climate bond minting page:

If you noticed, the impact bond yields CDAO, which is the governance token of Citizen DAO. CDAO has the following utility:

1. CDAO adds weight to your governance votes.
2. CDAO can be staked to mint Index Tokens for a discount.
3. Impact can be compounded by donating CDAO to NGOs.

Target Market & First Bonds

Our first two bonds will focus on $Climate & $Health. We have 5 climate web3 projects in the first cohort, but need to round it out to 10 before we start minting.

The first NGO impact bond is for Sanergy. This NGO solves sanitation problems in Africa by building affordable sanitation products designed specifically for urban slums. They also collect the waste, then treat & convert it to organic fertilizer for agricultural use in the same communities they serve.

The Roadmap

Season 1 starts April 28. We’re inviting talented people from around the world to brainstorm & collaborate on designing solutions to our world’s most pressing problems. Diversity is a must.

The Citizen DAO community has already spent significant time working in these areas. Now we’re collectively merging ideas & collaborating.

Here are a few examples of what our DAO members are currently working on and/or discussing:

$Health

• DeFi health “assurance” protocol that rewards you for improving your health while paying for healthcare services
• Health Operating System for global coordination & pandemic responses
• Personalized vaccines based on genetics, microbiomics, & other health data

$Housing

• Zero energy smart homes leveraging an energy grid of geothermal, solar, hydro, wind, bio, & nuclear
• 3D printed homes using graphene & geopolymers
• Empowering everyone to own their own homes

$Education

• Personalized AI teachers for kids & adults
• Portfolios for kids that map their strengths and build on their interests and dreams
• Ways for kids to make money while learning

$Climate

• Renewable Energy from Engineered Microbes
• Drone firefighting for structures & forests
• Geothermal, Hydro, Solar, Nuclear

$Governance

• A new political party called “The Startup Party”
• Hybrid governance model mixing Liquid Democracy + Meritocracy + Futarchy
• AI-powered legal systems

$Finance

• Universal Basic Income
• Universal Basic Assets that serve as a collateral source allowing every citizen to become their own bank
• Borrowing, lending, & insurance solutions leveraging the Universal Basic Assets

Our Team

Our core team has been working together for the past 5 years. Citizen DAO is actually a pivot from Citizen Health, which worked on building a DeFi health insurance alternative. In retrospect, we were 5-7 years too early with those ideas. Now it’s time.

Yes, we’re a DAO, but we’re sticking with c-suite names to make it easier to understand who is responsible for what.

Brennen Hodge, CEO (LinkedIn, Twitter)

• 14 year career in software development, financial engineering, & investing
• Founded 5 tech companies, 2 exits
• MBA from Southern Miss University; B.S. in Biochem from William Carey University

James Cunningham, Ph.D., CSO (LinkedIn)

• Developed blockchain solutions for the NHS
• Health Informatics at University of Manchester
• Ph.D., Information Systems, University of Salford; B.Sc., Computer Science from University of Manchester

Megan Janas, COO (LinkedIn, Twitter)

• Cofounded 2 digital health tech companies
• Cleveland Clinic Patient Excellence Award Finalist
• B.S., Global Business Management, Marketing & Competitive Intelligence from Arizona State University

Second Team: People contributing 10-20 hours per week to Citizen DAO

Ale Borda - DAO Partnerships
Jon Ruth - Solar Partnerships
Skye Aspen - NGO Partnerships

No matter your expertise, location, or availability, we welcome everyone interested in improving the world.

Join us in crowdfunding the future

Instead of the traditional VC or grant-style funding, we’re crowdfunding the development of Citizen DAO’s infrastructure. We’re raising 420 ETH (~ $1.2m USD) to kick off Season 1.

Join the DAO by getting a Citizenship NFT. You also receive an equivalent ETH amount in $Citizen tokens, which represents an economic stake in Citizen DAO. You can buy additional tokens if you want.

$Citizen will have a fixed supply and be allocated as follows:

• 10% to Initial Backers (you)
• 10% for Partnerships & Strategic Airdrops
• 50% to Founding Team & Early Contributors
• 30% to the Citizen DAO Treasury

The final token supply is determined by how much we raise when we close the round. If we hit our stretch goal of 1,690 ETH, that would value our token supply at ~$50m USD. If we only raise our goal of 420 ETH, then the valuation would be ~$12.6m. If you believe in this project, share it with everyone.

We’ll be hiring 5-10 full time people with the proceeds of this crowdfund. Let us know if you’re a UX Designer, React, or Solidity developer.

Citizenship NFTs

To join the full mission of Citizen DAO, you’ll need to hold a Citizenship NFT. This gives you specific governance rights, Discord access, and an early spot in helping humanity. Think of this as a passport to a new cloud nation we’re building together.

Citizenship perks:

• Citizenship to Citizen DAO
• Universal Basic Assets
• Governance rights
• Future airdrops
• Citizen-only Discord access
• Global “get out of a jam” card

While there are three editions of the Citizenship, each NFT results in citizenship in Citizen DAO. The difference with each NFT lies in the financial impact and $Citizen stake you’ll hold in the new organization we’re building.