Previously published

VICE – The Porn Token
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Brave – Encrypted Internet Browser
Sphere – Social Media that Tokenizes Your Personal Data
Ignite – Decentralized Rating System
Peerity – Steem’s Competitor
Decenternet - Decentralized Internet

Fundition.io: Crypto Crowdfunding Platform Based on Steem

Introduction

There really aren’t many funding methods in existence. One either accepts morally problematic grants or finds voluntary investors for any given type of project. Increasing amount of people around me refuse to seek funds through grants but that creates additional pressure to the competing funding methods.

I am rather positive that vast majority of people active in the cyberspace do know at least about Kickstarter. Kickstarter has plenty of “national adaptations” and other competitors like Patreon (that concentrates more on a “continuous funding” rather than one shot injection in a Kickstarter’s style). While Kickstarter, Patreon and similar project are perfectly moral and innovated crowdfunding methods when they were new and cool, civilization has reached yet another evolutionary step in this regard.

Crowdfunding and its current problems

Absence of “voting with wallet” tradition

“Most of the time great ideas stay ideas due to the lack of funding.”[1] I’m convinced that crowdfunding is in the long run the only sustainable method of funding projects that truly bring value to the people. As of yet, people are just not used to “voting with their wallet” but I believe that it will change throughout my lifespan (unlike other things necessary for liberation of the world). Not only that people are not used to voting with their wallet, but it’s even “more expensive” than they would like. First of all huge % of their actual money gets taken away to be used as others see fit and second of all current crowdfunding platforms only work in a way where a backer has to send actual money to the founder of the project. That sounds only logical, but technology provided us with other possible methods through which civilization could crowdfund good projects. More about that later though.

Win/lose situation

That isn’t the only problem though. A win/win situation for the founders of the project and its backers is very rarely established. Either founders just “yield” their ideas and let wealthy investors profit from them, or the backers lack the sufficiently reward for their contribution. Moreover the current platforms do not effectively provide possible collaboration for the project developers and possible backers that could contribute with more than just their funds.

Middleman

And then there is of course the “middleman problem” that is being solved by all the decentralized platforms by default. On average the “middleman” takes 12% of all the generated funds in the crowdfunding territory. That is insanely huge amount when we consider the fact that fundition.io takes precisely 0% [1]. That’s what decentralized platforms do. They are self-sustainable if set up properly.

Do or die

One of the biggest problems the today’s crowdfunding platforms have is the “do or die” syndrome. If the project doesn’t reach the desired amount, it receives nothing. The hardwork has though been already committed. This is syndrome caused by the product driven mentality that is bound to perish due to decentralized platforms that will establish The process driven mentality. The effect of this syndrome is that founders ask for much less money than is needed in order to receive at least some funds.

Fundition.io and Steem to the rescue

How Steem helps?

In the first chapter I stated that it is “more expensive than it could be” to vote with our wallet. What I meant by that? Well it is extremely “expensive” to transfer the exact amount of money from the backer’s wallet to the founder’s wallet, because the backer simply loses the money that way. Since Fundition.io is built on the Steem Blockchain, not only that the direct transfer is supported and free, but one can also support the projects via regular Steem upvotes (if one is invested in Steem), which boost the projects and don’t remove any funds from the backer. On the contrary the backer even gains some money from the curation reward. Doesn’t this sound like the future of crowdfunding? Aren’t we witnessing it even now? Yes and yes in my humble opinion.

Win/win situation

Truth be told, no platform can make sure that the founders truly do stand up to their word and deliver what they promised to deliver. What though Steem as a platform can do is to ensure that the backers do earn at least something through the curation reward. Backers are then more incentivized to support different projects via their upvotes without the fear that they would lose the money and wouldn’t receive anything for it.

No middleman

Middleman is useless 100% of the time. On Fundition.io there are only founders (the project creators), backers (the project supporters) and collaborators (those that can help with the actual creation of the project and receive portion of the gather money in return). Why would we support dominant corporations when we don’t need them I ask?

Process driven mentality

Steem naturally supports process driven models and not the product driven ones. That can clearly be proved by the decentralized applications that are currently “online” on Steem, like Fundition.io, Utopian.io, but also by communities that are being born like @sndbox. We in @sndbox support continuous creation of projects, just on much smaller scale than @fundition, whereas @utopian-io supports the process of open source development. It is due to the fact, that any given user can only upvote any given part of the project once, therefore there is the need to continuously report the creation of the individual parts of the project in order to be able to receive the continuous rewards. That has many benefits. Not only the community is continuously updated about the project’s progress, but process driven model is also much less risky for the founder of the project, since he/she is not dependant on the product sales. On the other hand though the founders don’t receive all the funds immediately and have to continually prove that they are working on the project to keep receiving the support. Product sales models force the founders to risk much more and lose everything if their product is not the winning one on the market. There are though different valuable aspects in every given project, not only the product itself, that deserve to be rewarded and that can further help other founders to build tools that will empower the whole humanity.

Current Fundition.io weaknesses

I never just praise. Full time praising sucks because then there is no relevant feedback for the project. To be honest though, there is very little I can criticize about Fundition.io. There basically are only 2 main points I came up with.

Difficulties launching huge projects

Fundition.io is awesome for launching small and medium sized projects. It though is very young platform (and so is the whole Steem Blockchain) and the traction there is still low compared to the centralized giants. Due to that fact it will be pretty hard to launch huge project via Fundition.io. Sad thing is that it isn’t anything that could be improved easily by the Fundition.io team. It is responsibility of all the users to spread the word about this new decentralized crowdfunding platform so it could once crowdfund even huge projects! In fact I’m doing pretty much that right about now!

Lacking interface

As I was browsing through the website, trying to come up with what is lacking, I suddenly realized that the interface could be worked upon. I totally understand that this is my individual taste, but in all honesty the interface look like it was created in early stages of current millennium. I think that it needs a better structure. The “How it works” link has a lot of information about all possible sides (founders, backers, collaborators) and it feels like the very same links located next to the “New project” is excessive. Also those categories are the first ones the new user will see and they don’t have almost any information compared to the same categories in the “How it works”. I would recommend brainstorming about possible restructuralization of those categories. Lastly I think that the whole interface could be brought to life with better graphics. But as I said this is maybe just my (bad?) taste. I though wanted to leave at least some kind of feedback on an overall great decentralized application!

As always do your research! You can do so through those links: