A new crypto-Utopian project launched Thursday with big aspirations: It wants to provide a modest universal basic income, or UBI, to the world by becoming a global currency and using macroeconomic maneuvering to spread the wealth.
Global Income Coin, nonprofit cryptocurrency startup, got off the ground with a $2 million donation by Sid Sijbrandij, the CEO and co-founder of San Francisco open-source software platform GitLabs, who also serves as a partner on the project.
With the money, Global Income Coin plans to get its GLO coins listed on major cryptocurrency exchanges.
The general plan is to get more and more people using GLO to build value for the coins, and then issue new coins, which will be given out to every individual person they can verify the identity of at a value of $7 or $1 a day. Identities will be verified by third-party cryptocurrency exchanges that already use KYC measures to verify users' identities. The startup plans to one day have some kind of deduplication technology to prevent people with multiple accounts from receiving more than their UBI allotment.
Global Income Coin will act as a quasi-central bank, attempting to keep the value of GLO around $1 per coin, by issuing new coins when the value gets too high and by buying stablecoins called USDC, which are partially backed by the U.S. dollar and remain a stable value. When the value drops below $1 it will buy GLO with stablecoins to drive the price up again.
The nonprofit is registered in Switzerland, but its CEO, Jeffrey Milewski, is based in San Francisco. He previously taught courses in economics and the blockchain at Creighton University and received a master's in political economy from the London School of Economics and Political Science, according to his LinkedIn.
"UBI is an interesting economic problem and we have interesting crypto tools to help figure this problem out," Milewski said. "We look at one of our missions as helping reducing extreme poverty, where the line currently is $1.90 a day and an extra dollar could really make a huge impact."
The startup is unabashed about its lofty ambitions. Its whitepaper, which was mostly written by Sijbrandij, posits the goal of giving every human on Earth a dollar a day can be funded when the coin reaches the market capitalization of the entire world money supply of $30 trillion. Central banks worldwide print $2.86 trillion in new money each year, the company said, money that can instead be distributed by Global Income Coin to give the roughly 7.9 billion people on the planet about a dollar a day. This is the max adoption scenario, and the white paper outlines a number of other complex ways it can achieve its goals.
However, the company does not have concrete plans yet of how to reach everyone on Earth, especially those without access to the internet or means to verify their identity to gain access to accounts on cryptocurrency exchanges, the very people an extra $1 a day would actually help.
"It's not so much about what’s happening today, but we want to be a catalyst to build infrastructure to reach those kinds of people," Milewski said. "Ecosystem partners will help people solve those problems and for now we have a longer term mindset."
It's unclear if this is an elaborate thought experiment or a quest for fiscal world domination, but as far as we can tell there is some real money behind the project — fiat money, ostensibly.
This is not the crypto world's first foray into giving everyone on Earth money. Sam Altman, former Y combinator president, founded World Coin in 2020 and sought to build a cryptocurrency-backed UBI program by sending employees out to developing countries with an iris-scanning device called "the Orb" to verify the identities of millions of people in exchange for a $20 voucher for World Coin.
A recent Buzzfeed expose reported that participants in the project now feel cheated as the coin is yet to launch and they have not received any material benefit for their effort, along with fears the biometric data will be sold for profit, despite the company's claims otherwise.
