Angel Protocol was founded in May 2021 to solve a problem affecting many charitable organizations: the lack of predictable, stable cash flows. Roughly 50% of all charities have less than 6 months of operating reserves, making them particularly exposed to financial fluctuations. This situation is exacerbated in countries with less established economies.
We created a versatile DeFi endowment product that is used by more than 160 charitable organizations in 26 countries. In only a few months, they were able to raise a total of $4.1 million through our platform and targeted fundraising campaigns such as Restore Earth. An additional $1.6 million for charities was raised and held in our very own endowment (the “AP Endowment”).
We created the DANO, the world’s first Decentralized Autonomous Non-profit Organization, underpinned by $HALO, its native token used for governance and curation. We designed an innovative set of economic incentives driven by $HALO to ensure that the most deserving charities have a chance to receive donations from our community as well as the Angel Alliance, a group of over 100 for-profit companies, projects, and protocols that have pledged 1-10% or more of their annual revenue to help fund charities in our indexes in perpetuity.
In our initial litepaper, we referred to our endowments as a new financial primitive that could be repurposed for a number of use cases (aka verticals): donor-advised funds, microfinance, personal finance, UBI to name just a few. By integrating these use cases into the DANO and redirecting a portion of the fees generated to charity, we developed the idea of an ecosystem for social impact.
This paper provides an update on these initial ideas by introducing Angel Growth Funds, versatile programmable DeFi funds with DAO tooling that share most of their codebase with our charity endowments. Angel Impact Funds always generate impact, whatever their purpose, by directly sharing a portion of the fee they generate with charities.
We will explore how Angel Impact Funds, in combination with a network-wide reputation system, makes Angel Protocol a true web3 ecosystem for social impact and a premier choice of technology for social impact entrepreneurs that need a swift time-tomarket with tried and tested platforms and tools.
Finally, we will provide an update to $HALO and our tokenomics, introducing important concepts such as token locking for additional governance vote weight and bonus rewards coming from fees generated by Angel Impact Funds as well as a novel method of estimating staking curation.
