Kickstarter to Launch its new company on Celo blockchain

Leading global creative crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter for over a decade has convinced the public to pay people to follow through on their ideas to fund a series of successful companies and startups to build a gadget, make a film or create a piece of art. 

More than $6billion has been pledged on Kickstarter which has gone into funding upwards of 200 projects. These projects have done a lot in raising the economic viability of startups to deal with unemployment and value-adding to the economy. Up to 80,000 full-time jobs have been created and upwards of 750,000 part time jobs also. These projects have gone on to become very successful businesses. Among these successful companies that started off as Kickstarter campaigns are Peloton stationary bikes which raised over $300,000. Also, the oculus VR headset project raised $2.4 million dollars. 

These successes have been the drive to push forward for Kickstarter. However, a need for more decentralization was needed to fulfil the company’s mission. That mission is to help bring creative projects to life. There has been a pledge to help unlock this latent potential in people and their ideas. And so to stay true to that mission and to serve it fervently, it is quite necessary that the company pays attention to its biggest strength: A truly United community working towards a common goal.  

Recently, in a joint statement by its Founder and Chair, Perry Chen, and CEO, Aziz Hasan through the company’s blog, it was announced that it will partner with Celo to build an open-source protocol that will create a decentralized version of the Kickstarter core functionality. It will go live on the Celo blockchain and will be available for all to access. It is intended to be a perfect blend of experience from over a decade of crowdfunding merged with the blockchain network. This will make more projects accessible and will allow for the complete transparency of the company vision. 

Celo has been chosen because of its devotion to the minimization of environmental impact and also the focus on being a carbon-negative blockchain platform. There will always be that reminder by building on Celo that there is a best practice to get systems in place that will work to help ourselves and our environment. Celo also has in its core the focus to establish global accessibility through mobile access to the blockchain and it has stayed true to this course. That will also impact the Kickstarter mission profoundly. 

Kickstarter also plans to create what it calls a governance lab, separate from the existing company and the new one, to provide independent governance for the protocol. This aims at ensuring the actual decentralization of the project.

The new company does not have a name yet. Development is slated to begin in the first quarter of next year, and Kickstarter expects to transition its site to the new protocol sometime in 2022.