What is AidCoin?
AidCoin Review & Guide
When most people are asked about using cryptocurrencies to make donations, their response is usually: “Well, it sounds cool but it is complicated, and I can’t be sure my donation will be used properly.” Yet, a few projects have tried to make donating with digital assets realistic and convenient.
Some charity organizations already accept donations using Bitcoin, but that has not yet convinced institutional donors who believe Bitcoin offers room for corruption and misappropriation of funds.
The challenge of making charity organizations accountable to the funds they receive is huge and real. There is no way to prove an organization spent the cryptocurrencies donated to them in the most responsible ways. But what if there were a means of ensuring accountability? AidCoin aims to be that solution. Where accountability is a key problem in humanitarian financing, AidCoin has a solution.
The unraveling paragraphs seek to simplify what AidCoin is, how it works and how it envisions changing the world of humanitarian financing.
What is AidCoin?
AidCoin is a decentralized application based on the Ethereum blockchain. Its mission is to help charity organizations receive cryptocurrency donations easily. The team behind AidCoin, Charity Stars, is based in Switzerland. They popularized the project in late 2017 with an ICO that raised more than 14,000 ether coins.
With the raised funds, AidCoin has the aim of building a platform that could utilize the blockchain technology to track how donations are utilized. The company plans to leverage smart contracts to hold charitable organizations accountable and the blockchain to keep records transparent.
The AidCoin platform is a complete ecosystem. It consists of a token used for payments, an internal exchange that converts major coins into AidCoins and a tracker to help you stay updated on how your donations are used. Collectively, the AidCoin platform is known as AidChain.
With 100 million tokens set as its maximum supply, AidChain aims to revolutionize the humanitarian sector through better financial management. The tokens are yet to gain any meaningful value, but the AidChain platform has been attracting attention since early in the year.
In April 2018, the AidCoin Charity Stars team met Real Madrid football player, Cristiano Ronaldo, and received a $36,000 donation in Bitcoin. The meet up quickly popularized AidCoin and its platform. The AidChain community has also met the Wikipedia Foundation, held conferences in the US and Europe.
While the conferences and meet-ups have not largely helped AidCoin prices increase; they have helped popularize the project. The AidCoin is increasingly receiving more hype. However, Charity Star’s first mission is to popularize their company to potential donors and show them how they can help improve the manner in which donations are managed.
If the platform is able to increase adoption among large institutional donors, charity organizations willing to be held accountable will increase. Consequently, the value of AidCoin tokens will surge as well.
How AidCoin Works
Through the AidChain ecosystem, donors can buy AidCoin tokens with Bitcoin and other popular cryptocurrencies at no charge. Charity Organizations, on the other hand, can get a payment gateway to set up on their websites.
Donations made using AidCoin tokens to a charity organization in partnership with AidChain are then recorded on a special digital ledger. Charity Organizations have the opportunity to report on the uses of the donations they received at different stages of implementation.
In addition to self-reporting, the AidCoin platform will offer room for third-party reporting by NGO oversight organizations like GuideStar and Charity Navigator. However, before the donations funds are released to charities, they are held in smart contracts until the recipients fulfill any pre-determined conditions given by donors.
A donor could give $100,000 worth of AidCoins and set the following conditions:
- Release $20,000 after the recipient publishes an actionable budget for the donations
- Release $30,000 after the recipient provides proof of how the previous $20,000 donations were spent
- Release $50,000 after the recipient provides a detailed account of how they spent the previous $50,000
If a donor is not satisfied by how a charity organization spent some of the funds they released to them, AidCoin allows them to claim back their donations.
AidCoin says that using their decentralized system of governing donor funds is much more beneficial than any traditional alternative.
Lower Costs
By using smart contracts to hold funds and the blockchain to record and access data publicly, AidCoin eliminates the need for middlemen such as banks and government agencies. It helps reduce the fees charged to make donations using traditional fiat currency and complete transactions instantly.
Efficiency
AidCoin’s main goal is to streamline the financial sector of humanitarian efforts. Conventionally, it is difficult to track how charities spend donors’ funds. Many of them are never willing to provide important details about their expenditure.
AidCoin provides an ecosystem that keeps every record of the donation process open. Donors can keep track of their funds as they are held on smart contracts. Charity Organizations can build credibility by providing every detail about how they spend donations.
They can also utilize the blockchain to manage the funds they receive and to reduce any overhead costs by inefficient use of resources.
Tax Breaks
In countries where individuals are eligible for tax deductions for making donations, AidCoin’s services can be utilized. They provide a receipt for every donation made so that donors can effectively claim tax breaks as needed.
AidCoin Services and Products
Registration and Verification
Companies that want to partner with AidCoin will be registered and verified to confirm their legitimacy. AidCoin has a partnership with a Switzerland-based company that will be responsible for KYC verification. However, the platform will provide the address needed to associate a specific organization.
Donors will have fewer regulations and can register anonymously. They will have a special dashboard and a team ready to help them at any stage of the process.
AidPay
AidPay is a special Payment Gateway that accepts donations in any major cryptocurrency but converts them into AidCoin tokens. It is embeddable on a website just like any other Payment Gateway.
Donations must be held using AidCoin tokens for easy tracking on the AidChain ecosystem. If the donations are kept in any other cryptocurrency, they are not held using AidPay smart contracts, and donors can’t receive the services offered by AidCoin.
Blockchain-based Tracker
Every donation held by AidCoin’s smart contracts is also recorded on the Ethereum blockchain. AidCoin is an ERC20 token after all. However, AidCoin offers additional services such as the recipients’ addresses, timestamps and other relevant information required to make the whole process efficient.
Smart Contracts’ Templates
The AidChain ecosystem will hold all funds in smart contracts. Every donor can view and trace how their funds are allocated using a customizable template. Donors will be allowed to make conditions of how their funds should be spent using these templates.
AidCoin Price Growth
Like many emerging cryptocurrencies, the AidCoin crypto coin is struggling to attract adoption by investors. Its price since January 20th, 2018, when it was listed on crypto exchanges, has been a roller coaster.
From an opening AidCoin price of $0.73, the coin retained a price higher than its ICO price of $0.65 for just about one week. Since then, the AidCoin growth rate has been unstable. It has hit a market cap of $10 million twice and maintained an average of $7 million for the 5 months it has been around.
Investors who believe in the AidCoin project may need to hold onto their coins for longer to make profits. As at the time of writing, AidCoin tokens are valued at $0.11 and have shown signs of embarking on a bullish run. After suffering a market crash in the first days of June 2018, AidCoin has been rising slightly to regain and surpass its earlier $0.15 price at the end of May 2018.
Long-term investors shouldn’t worry about the coin’s fluctuations. AidCoin is still a new cryptocurrency by any standards. Most crypto coins take at least one year to assume a positive growth curve. With its partnership with celebrities and institutional donors, it won’t be long until the coin rises above $1 in value.
Summary
AidCoin is a decentralized application deployed on the Ethereum blockchain. The project is owned by Charity Stars, an Switzerland-based organization that wants to leverage the blockchain technology to make funding donors’ funds efficient and transparent.
Although the AidCoin token is still struggling in value, AidCoin’s team members are actively marketing their platform to crypto exchanges and institutional donors. The team has worked with already several charities and international celebrities, including Kate Moss, Avril Lavigne and Adriana Lima. Aidcoin is listed on Bittrex, Upbit and Bitfinex.
The future of AidCoin looks bright. If the company is able to convince more institutional donors to invest in their project, they won’t have a problem attracting charity organizations. In the process, both the company and AID token investors will win. Donors will be able to find value in their donation money whereas charity organizations can get the funding they so much need.
Thanks for reading our AidCoin guide. You are welcomed to check out more of our guides about other cryptocurrencies on our website.