Stellar Community Fund

By Glo Dollar

Glo Dollar (USDGLO) on Stellar

SCF #21

$13.0K

Legacy v5.0 Activation Award

Awarded

Glo is the stablecoin that generates basic income for people in extreme poverty, and deploy liquidity on StellarX.

Products & Services

A fiat-backed, U.S. regulated stablecoin

Glo Dollar is a new stablecoin. It’s comparable to USDC: always 1:1 redeemable for US dollars, fully backed by cash and short-term US Treasuries.

Glo is regulated in the United States. Reserve assets are held across several US financial institutions, with a monthly breakdown of assets published at https://brale.xyz/stablecoins/USDGLO

Generating basic income for people in extreme poverty

Glo Dollar is the anti-poverty stablecoin. As market cap goes up, extreme poverty goes down.

Here’s how it works: Like other stables, Glo Dollar makes money from the interest on the fiat reserves. The difference: the Glo Foundation does not make profits. Instead, we donate 100% of the interest we receive to GiveDirectly, the world’s fastest-growing charity. They provide basic incomes for people living in extreme poverty, in countries such as Kenya.

As a result: when Glo Dollar adoption grows, we lift more people out of extreme poverty by funding their basic incomes.

Glo enables donationless philanthropy

Glo can be used like any other stablecoin, but it also enables a new crypto use case: donationless philanthropy. Glo Dollar users automatically reduce extreme poverty without paying for it. This new form of philanthropy is made possible by the stablecoin business model. Like any stablecoin, holding Glo Dollar is free. But holding it does grow the Glo Dollar market cap, meaning the reserves contain more assets. And more assets yield more interest, meaning we’ll give more money to GiveDirectly, meaning fewer people will live in extreme poverty (because they receive a basic income).

Donationless philanthropy can lift millions of people out of extreme poverty

At scale, we expect to be able to keep one person out of extreme poverty for every $20,000 of Glo Dollar adoption. Learn why. For comparison, at the time of writing, Tether’s market cap is $83.8 billion. At that size, Glo would be lifting an expected 4.2 million people out of extreme poverty.

What does Glo bring to the Stellar ecosystem?

A new stablecoin. Mission-driven, fiat backed & US regulated. Stablecoins power some of Stellar’s best use cases and form a key component of the ecosystem. It’s healthy to have various alternatives to choose from.

A new use case: donationless philanthropy. With Glo, Stellar ecosystem participants can reduce poverty at zero cost.

A new way to fulfill Stellar’s mission: to create equitable access to the global financial system.

The Glo App

Donationless philanthropy is a new reason for consumers and businesses to use stablecoins for real-world transactions. To show the impact holders are having, we built the Glo App. When you connect your wallet, the Glo App shows the amount of basic income you’re generating per year and explains what this means for someone in extreme poverty. For instance, someone holding $18,000 of Glo generates up to $432 of basic income per year. For someone living in extreme poverty, this is sufficient to buy 80m2 of farm land, or the materials to build a house. The Glo App gives users a sharable personal impact page and helps consumers that are not crypto-savvy to start participating in donationless philanthropy through the “Choose a path” feature. We’ll integrate Stellar so Stellar wallets can be connected to the Glo App. We’ll also include a Stellar route to the “Choose a path” feature.

Issuance, treasury, and attestations

The Glo Foundation has chosen Brale, Inc to serve as the issuer of the Glo Dollar. Brale is a registered Money Services Business and a licensed money transmitter in the US. Brale manages the fiat reserves, composed of cash & cash equivalents and short-term U.S. Treasuries, and supports 1:1 minting and redemption from and to USDC and USD. Monthly reserve attestations are published on brale.xyz/stablecoins/USDGLO. These will be independent third-party attestations from November onwards.

Liquidity and on/off-ramping

We'll initially deploy $100,000 of USDC/USDGLO liquidity on StellarX to support retail adoption. This $100K will be continually rebalanced by our partnering market maker; i.e. there will always be $100K Glo Dollar available. For companies, eligible U.S. entities can mint and redeem arbitrarily large amounts of Glo Dollar with Brale, so they have access to "infinite liquidity". Non-US entities can use OTC desk 1Konto. If initial adoption goes well, we can start growing liquidity to larger amounts to support heavier use cases. Depending on adoption and demand, it may additionally be fruitful to support other trading pairs such as XLM/USDGLO.

Overview of products, users and involved parties

To summarize: Glo Foundation brings Glo Dollar (USDGLO) to Stellar using Brale. Our market maker deploys $100K USDGLO / USDC to the Stellar DEX. Retail users can trade USDC for USDGLO via Stellar wallets. Retail users can connect their wallets to app.glodollar.org to view indirect contributions to GiveDirectly, reducing extreme poverty. Non-retail users can acquire/redeem larger amounts of USDGLO through issuer Brale or OTC desk 1Konto.