Many different potential use cases for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have come to light in the last few years, including art, gaming, luxury ownership and collectibles. UniqueOne.Network (UON) has been exploring that since the launch of its marketplace Unique.One, which was created to give economic alternatives to artists around the world who have been affected by COVID-19 lockdowns. The founding team wanted to make sure that those artists played a primary role in the development of the platforms by seeking solutions to common issues in artistic fields such as censorship, copyright, licensing and royalties.
UON has realized that the NFT sector – with its potential for volume and liquidity – could also be a good fit for the huge global market that is philanthropy. A recent report by the Harvard Kennedy School found that there are more than 260,000 charitable foundations around the world with combined assets of over $1.5 trillion. But those assets are widely dispersed, with over 50% of the foundations reporting assets of less than $1 million. A key challenge is to make the transmission of the assets to individuals in need as seamless as possible.
UniqueOne.Love is a philanthropic venture solely sponsored by UON that is harnessing decentralization technology to facilitate giving in the peer-to-peer sharing economy. It’s an NFT marketplace for donors, from individuals to crypto projects, to raise funds for philanthropic issues they care about.
An Ambitious NFT Philanthropic Venture
The UON team is collaborating with charity leaders in hard-hit test areas to reimagine the relationships between donors, charities and beneficiaries. Merely throwing distributed ledgers at the charity sector won’t solve its problems; it needs to be done in collaboration.
Even though the UniqueOne.Love project is still weeks away from launching, the founding team voted to start a test project, UOL_Malaysia, to bring relief directly to those suffering in Malaysia with th economic and political crises facing the country.
A think tank of charity leaders, technologists and project managers has been formed to address the challenges of demonstrating end-to-end transparency, digital asset volatility, verification of real-world events, the legality of cryptocurrencies in certain countries, bridging conversions to local fiat currencies and ensuring charities adhere to local regulatory compliance requirements.
UniqueOne.Love is also collaborating with online fundraising forum AyoBantuin in Indonesia. AyoBantuin helps donors to reach their social goals in the digital era, while providing on-the-ground outreach to empower those struggling with basic needs. Information regarding the progress of patients or people being helped is transparent and consistently updated on the AyoBantuin.com website.
The UON team is committed to finding ways that blockchain and NFTs can deliver better services to empower those in need. Rather than starting by conceptualizing the protocol in a white paper, the UON team decided to create UniqueOne.Love in real life and fine tune it on the go.
All of UON’s NFT marketplaces, on multiple chains and in diverse niches, have turned down venture capital backing and corporate support in order to make sure that their community decentralized autonomous organizations remained in control, while keeping pace with new developments in decentralized finance (DeFi) and gaming. Developing this 100% nonprofit NFT platform is no small feat and will take time and effort. But people are suffering from the economic fallout of COVID lockdowns and the time to act is now.