OpenLitterMap got $50,000 funding from Cryptocurrency Cardano
It took 12 years of research including 2 masters and more than 70+ grant applications to get our first round of funding which did not come from any traditional source.
Cryptocurrency community Cardano voted, for the first time, to finance the development of environmental monitoring.
Project Catalyst is the VC and accelerator instrument of Cardano that is investing $1 million USD into startups through its native token ada.
Holders of the ada token get to vote on what proposals to fund, which was raised by putting a small tax on cryptocurrency transactions. Voters get rewarded with additional ada for participating in the voting.
Over 285 million ada tokens representing nearly $0.5 billion dollars voted for our proposal Littercoin: Mass Adoption.
Littercoin is the first crypto-token rewarded for the production of geographic information i.e. contributing data to citizen science research.
We are creating open source environmental monitoring tools that are increasingly becoming decentralised. We extend this by tokenising the process in order to create an incentive. Users of our app are rewarded with Littercoin for doing the work of collecting data which we want to use to incentivise participation in the zero waste and circular economy.
As cryptocurrencies are generally associated with speculative trading, we have made the decision to make Littercoin the first non-tradable token that will not be listed on any exchange. Our smart contract will verify the authenticity of each Littercoin and verify that it has not been traded on any exchange.
We have since hired 2 new software developers who are helping build our web and mobile apps which you can see on github.com/openlittermap. They will be working full-time for the next 3 months thanks to the people voting on Cardano who made history by being the first decentralised community of people who voted to finance the development of open source environmental monitoring tools.
After fixing some bugs and launching an improved mobile app we will revisit machine learning and begin working on the first iteration of the Littercoin Smart Contract.
Want to help? Join us on Slack and help shape the future direction of OpenLitterMap
