The Giving Chain: Blockchain Powering Generosity
A Hyperledger social impact project under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation.
Blockchain technology is a strong pillar for driving supply chains for both enterprise and nonprofit entities. For nonprofits, the difference is as critical as ensuring vital aid is delivered to an entire region or group of individuals in need. The Giving Chain, comprised of three different social impact projects, is seeking to aid humanitarian crises and regional emergencies.
Through distributed ledger technology, the model becomes decentralized, allowing for all parties to be able to track the donations live in a secure, trusted, and verifiable manner. The immutability of transactions affords the entire network a tamper-proof assurance, which supplies a greater sense of ease and dignity to the nonprofit assistance schema.
In this piece, the Giving Chain would like to convey the purpose and mission statement of the project. If this cause speaks to the reader, we kindly ask for assistance in the form of donations to our GoFundMe initiative and to help spread the word.
The Giving Chain is the recipient of a Government Blockchain Association Award for Social Impact in 2020 and an honorary mention at the Big Apps Blockchain challenge. The Giving Chain project initiatives are:
Project Princeton
Project Uttarakhand
Project Women.
Each is highlighted in its own respective section below.
Project Princeton
This project is based in the tri-state area of the United States. Donations from food drives and surplus produce from Jersey farmers will be distributed to local food banks. The aim is to combat hunger locally for families and individuals in need. This urgency has been amplified due to the effects of the covid pandemic. The initiative follows the local charity giving model and has been in effect since 2019.
Project India- Uttarakhand
Localized to the Uttarakhand area of India, this project’s purpose is to aid local farmers who have been impacted by flooding. For farmers in this region, donations are vital as their sole livelihood has suffered.
Project India-Women
A Women’s crisis is a humanitarian crisis. Women in India across many regions are in dire need of sanitary products. Ongoing efforts have been made in the past, but distributed ledger technology increases the assurance of women receiving the help that they need.
Technical Stack
Fundamentally the aim of the project is to transact the proof of ownership of the donations between each entity in the network. The party’s claim on the donation is verified through an NFT digital twin to declare that the resources are in their possession at that point in time.
The first two projects are donor-driven, while project women is a recipient-driven model.
The projects are utilizing the power of Hyperledger to allow broadcasting of the transaction to the nodes in the network. Nodes may have integrations with other enterprise technology. Each node in the decentralized network will have its own identity and will be representative of a specific role. Roles in the model include donors, recipients, drivers, and NGOs at present. If interested in building out this technology please follow this link: https://crowdfunding.lfx.linuxfoundation.org/projects/47d16213-d73a-4e24-bf8f-3deaf499d6d4/payments
Multiple projects under the umbrella of Linux Foundation’s suite of Hyperledger tooling are being researched for compatibility and integration. These will be explored and possibly integrated in phases as the codebase and functionality develops.
Author
mr1241@scarletmail.rutgers.edu