When we talk about applying blockchain to giving, a lot of the initial focus has been on keeping financial data as a means of improving transparency or lowering transaction costs. That’s understandable though. After all, money is established at this point as a way of the transaction and is thus quite handy when we talk about the practicalities of paying for stuff which can be utilized to provide social outcomes.

Blockchain Technology for Social Impact

One intangible asset which is of specific interest in a philanthropic context is social value. Blockchain has the potential to become the infrastructure which could offer available big-scale data sets on environmental or social need. There’s interesting stuff taking place about the former. For example, the idea of Data Trusts puts forward in a previous government-backed report on the future of the UK AI industry. Nonetheless, there’s apparently still more to do when it comes to opening up data siloes in the private, public and voluntary sectors.

Furthermore, there’s positive progress about the latter, like the work of 360 Giving who have handled to obtain a good amount of major UK humanitarian funders to adopt a reliable, open data method to publishing data on their grants.

Following are some of the possible application of blockchain technology in social impact data.

• Programmed recording of social impact data

The blockchain is often spoken in association with IoT. That’s because it appears likely to deliver the missing piece about infrastructure which enables transactions among smart objects to happen at scale. When such objects are represented and connected on the similar blockchain which underpins a social purpose, they could record stuff like health information on environmental settings directly. That can be achieved without any human members of requiring to be involved.

• Human Recording of Forthcoming Social Impact Data

In the long run, would it be possible to get away from the necessity to accord single nodes in the privileged network status by their prior experience? If people can make new incentive mechanisms which reward those who record data continuously and accurately and punish those who don’t, such mechanisms may be financial, but they would not have to be.

XinFin counters this concern by offering financiers incentives in the sort of smart-exchange resources over the XDC for value investment and hazard hedging so they can fund the projects with poor buyer and dealer rating. XinFin is dedicated to lowering the infrastructure deficiency, in this way, decreasing the hole between the poor and rich people.

Fascinatingly, the usage of crypto-tokens to recompense truthful reporting is something which has been mooted in the context of the current battle against fake news. That reads across neatly to the concept of incentivizing accurate social impact reporting.

• Foreseeing Social Impact

So could we make prediction markets for social impact? The concept is that individuals would be able to select an outcome and “bet” on how likely they believe a presented approach or intervention is to present that outcome. Then, there would be a mechanism to reward those whose predictions which became accurate. Thus, those who proved to be better at distinguishing the most efficient ways of providing outcomes would win bigger.

We guess we should ante up and decide how much we like to stake on our theory of change.