The BTA Launches the Blockchain Impact Ledger

Innovation is critical to building a better society. It equips governments and civil society with new tools to address global challenges, and magnifies the impact of organizations that are already fighting for equality and prosperity. Despite the potential for positive impact, innovation in the public sphere often suffers from fragmentation, duplication of efforts, and other unnecessary complications due to a lack of updated and accessible information. The rapid developments in the blockchain space amplify these challenges, hindering organizations and governments from making the best decisions because they are unable to easily access best practices, and learn from fellow innovators’ successes and failures. Without trusted and updated information, it is difficult for organizations interested in leveraging blockchain and other frontier technologies to learn from, and potentially coordinate with, other aligned initiatives.

It is within this context that the Blockchain Trust Accelerator, with support from Social Alpha Foundation, created the Blockchain Impact Ledger. The Blockchain Impact Ledger was built to fill an information gap in the blockchain for social impact space. The Blockchain Impact Ledger serves as a centralized repository to make it easy for governments, nonprofits, civil society organizations and other supporters to better understand the evolution and current state of the blockchain for social impact industry (and we recognize the irony of a centralized repository of information about a decentralized technology). By maintaining an accurate, up-to-date and standardized registry of blockchain for social impact initiatives, the Blockchain Trust Accelerator hopes to catalyze new partnerships and inspire organizations to collaborate on leveraging blockchain solutions to solve some of the world’s greatest social challenges.

To address the sophisticated and changing needs of the blockchain for social impact community, the Blockchain Impact Ledger will also evolve. This initial version of the Blockchain Impact Ledger is a deliberately early iteration, or a minimum viable product (MVP). It is not yet a comprehensive list of projects, nor has the categorization been completely finalized. While we conducted research and spoke with blockchain experts in building the database, we expect that the lack of universally-accepted definitions in the blockchain and social impact spaces will spur debate from the greater community. We embrace this debate, and believe that only by engaging in dialogue can we produce a final product that best represents the blockchain and social impact communities.

With that spirit, we invite you to dive into the first edition of the Blockchain Impact Ledger. The introduction provides a basic background to the Impact Ledger, how it was conceived, and the problems it seeks to address. The methodology explains the processes and reasoning behind certain design and data collection decisions in creating the Impact Ledger. We encourage your feedback and welcome additional suggestions for projects to evaluate for inclusion in the next iteration of the Impact Ledger.