We would like to build a DAO on the cardano blockchain, whose purpose is to accept funds, invest them via staking and available defi platforms, and sustainably grow and distribute guaranteed lifetime incomes to randomly selected applicants who meet a set of criteria (e.g. adult, individual, living) until everyone who wants to and qualifies is receiving a living wage. We believe this can be done via:

1. Building a smart contract which receives donations, adds them to the endowment pool, and returns to the donor a receipt-nft, which can be used for tax deduction (where allowed) and the weighting of one's vote during governance by the ada-value at time of donation.
2. Connecting with dex/oracle to determine ada-value at time of donation.
3. Making liberal use of the various governance tools funded in Fund 7 (e.g. <https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/384243> and https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/384821)) using our receipt nfts as a way of weighing the votes. Governance will be used for decisions such as, determining what criteria a person should meet to receive an income (e.g. age minimum), deciding how the endowment invests its funds, and picking what digital identity providers can be thought of as reliable for our use-case.
4. Researching and partnering w/ on-chain identity providers to gather the needed criteria for who can receive an income (individual, living, adult, etc).
5. Distributing funds to recipients as endowment pool can sustainably support while growing. So long as staking and defi yield greater rate than population growth (~1%), and we reinvest proportionally, we can expect to approach a truly universal income over time.

We believe our proposal will benefit the ecosystem via the following:

1. Driving blockchain adoption
   1. We will be providing strong incentives for individuals to create wallets, as on a certain level, we are quite literally paying them to do so.
   2. We feel the charity space is under-utilizing blockchain technology. We can build an example, utilizing its core strengths i.e. censorship-resistance, ease of fund movement, and decentralized governance - things which cardano excels at or are at the forefront of. Our hope is our example can provide a starting point to other non-profits looking for useful tools to fulfill their purpose.
2. Driving the adoption and maturity of the decentralized identity space
   1. Similar to the point above, we will creating a strong incentive for people to use these technologies.
   2. Our DID requirements will likely differ from many of the proposed early use-cases (kyc, ownership nfts etc) in that we will need to determine uniqueness across DID providers, to prevent double signup. We can help push this forward by identifying and partnering with interested DID providers and by helping to establish standards.
3. Help expand the non-artwork use cases for nfts.

Our biggest challenge will be in selecting recipients. The decentralized digital identity space is very much in its infancy. Establishing robust, reliable ways of gathering the required information in a privacy-preserving way is outside the direct scope of this project, and we will be somewhat reliant on emerging DID solutions to provide this.

Milestones:

1. Build website at subdomain of incomeproject.org where details about the dao can live, donating and voting will be added when ready.
2. Design receipt-nft, which captures information about sending address, datetime, currency, and amount.
3. Establish basic donor portal, where users can donate ada and receive a receipt-nft via off-chain computing.
4. Identify unsaturated, single stake pools that donate a portion of their proceeds to charitable causes. Stake donated funds there.
5. Implement basic voting where donors can participate in governance. Initial implementation will use a hybrid approach similar to Catalyst, where the voting is weighted via on-chain information, but the actual voting occurs off-chain.
6. Research DID space to see what criteria we can select for and which providers will be most helpful.
7. Use community governance to select DID providers and the criteria to use for filtering those who've applied.
8. Open up process for applying to receive a guaranteed living wage.
9. Build mechanism for distributing funds to selected recipients.
10. Research cardano's oracle and dex space to get the ada value of other native assets, so that we can accept other tokens for donations and still be able to record the ada value at time given in our receipt-nfts.
11. Use community governance to establish what non-ada tokens we accept, and how we invest them.
12. Update donor portal to use smart contracts, pending security audit.
13. Update voting portal to be as on-chain as practical, pending security audit.
14. Update fund distribution to be handled as on-chain as practical, pending security audit.
15. Automate non-ada token investment via governance selected strategy, pending security audit.
16. Identify costs for security audit, to be performed as funding allows.

We will be doing this project on a volunteer basis, performing the development work in exchange for the fund award to be donated to the incomeproject.org.

Graham Paye - Income Project founder. Former orchestral violinist, educator, and Google engineer. Graham currently works building out software that supports non-profit organizations. https://www.linkedin.com/in/graham-paye

Ilya Katz - Board Member, software developer by trade with interest in education, mentoring, social economics and problems of financial inequality. https://www.linkedin.com/in/katzil

All work will be open source, so progress can be viewable at https://github.com/incomeproject when the repo is created. We are also very inspired by Liqwid Finance's community updates, and will be seeking to replicate that on reddit, twitter, and the dao section of our website, when it's finished.

1. User can donate funds via the dao section of our website.
2. Donors receive a receipt-nft, detailing time, amount, currency, and wallet address.
3. Wallets holding one or more receipt-nfts can propose policy changes.
4. Wallets holding one or more receipt-nfts can vote on policy change proposals.
5. Funds are periodically distributed to the pool of randomly selected applicants meeting criteria established via community governance.

This is our first proposal.