Balance’s Crowdfunding Is Live: $300k+ in less than 3 hours using Mirror on Ethereum
We have had lots of funds reach out to talk about funding Balance. We decided to open up the funding to the public on Ethereum. This only took a few days of planning & a few hours of writing to ship.
tl;dr: If you want to fund our work at Balance and join our new DAO, go here:
ricburton.mirror.xyz/crowdfunds/0x9500b696F00AE82CA97d06379CF0A2b60B467040
You will need an Ethereum wallet to participate. If you have any questions, just reply to this email and I will try to answer them as soon as possible.
Crowdfunding Equity vs. Tokens
During the bull market of 2017, I decided I wanted to raise some money to build interfaces for Ethereum. I looked into doing an ICO but it felt wrong. They were all raising too much money way too fast. They mostly failed.
I decided to do a crowdfunding round on WeFunder where we raised ~$1.3m after months of work.
You can see it here: wefunder.com/balance
Today, I set up a crowdfunding campaign on Mirror and within a few hours we have received almost half a million dollar of Ether in return for NFTs & ERC-20s.
Mirror cleverly combines ERC-20 tokens and NFTs to create levels of crowdfunding. Everyone who contributes receives a portion of the $LFG tokens.
People who hit certain levels receive bonus app icon NFTs:
I have to be honest, the experience of doing a Wefunder campaign was absolutely excruciating. It took months to prepare, weeks to complete, and tens of thousands of dollars to execute. It was insanely stressful. Mirror is totally different:
WeFunder: Months of auditing, preparation, accounting & missing payments
Mirror: Hours of writing, marketing, vibing & same-day transactions
This is the power of Ethereum: reducing the cost of human coordination. This is the real magic of this protocol. It gives people economic tools to trust each other.
If people believe in our team, they will buy $LFG tokens to join our community. If they do not trust us, they will dump them.
What is the difference between a company and a DAO?
The term DAO stands for Decentralised Autonomous Organisation. However, it has become a catch-all acronyms for entities on Ethereum. Acronyms often take on new meanings. For example, MP3 and NFT have totally new connotations.
Balance is a company incorporated in Delaware and a DAO defined on Ethereum.
We are just starting to explore the overlap between these two things:
Today, the Apple & Ethereum communities have a huge overlap. It is just a much more secure ecosystem because Apple tightly controls the entire stack.
Balance will always need a company to interact with Apple.
Balance wants to use a DAO to interact with Ethereum.
If we want to be the interface between Apple and Ethereum, we need to respect and explore the mediums they understand.
We plan to have deep integrations with fiat on-ramps that are companies and popular Ethereum projects like ENS.
How is Balance different from every other wallet?
There are literally hundreds of Ethereum wallets on the app store. Why does the world need another one?
This is a very fair question.
My answer is simple: how many do you use regularly?
The answer is revealing. Nearly everyone in Ethereum suffers from an extreme wealth bias. They can afford a laptop and work on one all day.
The vast majority of the world do not have a desktop or laptop. They use a phone as their primary personal computer.
I cannot emphasise this enough: if you are in front of a large screen, you are the exception, not the rule. If Ethereum truly wants to work for the people, it must work on mobile.
Balance is focused on Apple because we feel that is most secure platform to secure your most valuable digital assets. While Android dominates in terms of absolute numbers, it is severely lacking when it comes to basic security guarantees.
The other major difference: we are not owned by banks or big crypto funds.
Every other wallet has raised money from these institutions. MetaMask is backed by JP Morgan! It is absolutely insane to me that the most valuable Ethereum wallet is going to be part-owned by a bank. It just feels wrong.
Open Sourcing Everything Apart From The Brand
We are making a commitment to open sourcing everything we build aside from the brand. You can fork our code, you cannot confuse our community. I view code as the exhaust fumes of the engine you build to produce it.
We plan to use our company and our community to build moats around our app. If other teams have better ideas than us, they should help us or fork off.
This is the way Ethereum works. This is the way we will work, too.
If you want to learn more about the history of Open Source, please do watch this 90-minute documentary:
Want to fund us? Please check out our Mirror campaign
We would love to welcome you to the Balance community. Anyone with an internet connection and an Ethereum wallet can invest.
Go here:
https://ricburton.mirror.xyz/crowdfunds/0x9500b696F00AE82CA97d06379CF0A2b60B467040