Upe is developing real-world use cases within our local community that leverage blockchain technology to scale a public good. Our model can be duplicated or forked for any local community to replicate. Upe empowers communities in Costa Rica to crowdsource and syndicate local information, developing real-world use cases that harness blockchain technology to scale a public good. Community information is often only shared in gated chats and private groups. Upe serves as a hub for anyone to post information, such as community events, water consumption reports, and beach cleanup collection results, making this data publicly available to everyone.

We’ve been making progress since April 2024:

Upe Impact is a revolutionary web application designed to facilitate coordinating community betterment projects for non-crypto “natives”. In essence, Upe Impact puts the heart of their communities on the blockchain by providing tools that enhance efficiency in community projects and ensuring that the efforts of contributors and organizers are accurately recorded, verified, and celebrated. Upe Impact is a companion dApp for Upe. In its current state, Upe innovates by putting together, in the same place, the local information, collected and curated by locals, and spaces (like digital Agoras) for the community to make decisions. It’s an App that we aim to turn into a DApp.

How it Works

With an integrated authentication system powered by thirdweb, the application generates user wallets upon login, ensuring secure access for all users, regardless of their technical expertise, from web3 natives to novices. This design ensures that any web user can utilize this tool with zero web3 knowledge.

By bringing all the data on-chain, we aim to be able to experiment with ways to monetize it so the communities can also gain from their work, and coordinate globally.

Who uses it

Upe is a civic-bottom-up data initiative verified and tested (by communities, individuals, small businesses, tourists, and even the government of Costa Rica), and it already has traction, as our stats show. Our community framework can be forked for any other local community.

By the time we collected data for our last report, we had:

• 3,902,370 Search Impressions (From April to August )
• 80,000+ Unique annual users
• 1,000+ Weekly subscribers
• 2 successful contracts with local authorities
• 100 Local Contributors

Major updates

As we blaze into H2 of 2024, we are delighted to announce some significant updates and future plans.

Major milestones achieved last quarter

• Secured funding from Public Nouns for contributor bounties.
• Hosted our first IRL community fundraiser event for 600 local attendees, with 12 NGOs as beneficiaries.
• Built and launched Upe Impact on Base as proof of concept for Onchain Summer.
• Organized and hosted the first Upe community retreat with 30 attendees to plan the upcoming year - for local communities.
• Procured funding for a matching pool from Arbitrum Foundation and Oasis Onchain for onboarding NGOs participating in our next community event.
• Conducted weekly off-chain voting for our members to introduce non-crypto users to basic governance exercises.
• Website received 3.5 million impressions from search engines (971% increase from last year).

Upcoming Goals

• Build Upe Impact to make it chain-agnostic
• Bring Upe Vote onchain
• Relaunch community pages based on data from voting and feedback loop

In Progress

• Feedback loop for locals to uncover information such as important topics, preferred channels, etc., to continue developing the Upe community stack.
• Developing an annual plan with contributors and local community members based on the Upe community framework.
• Decentralizing the curation and syndication of community information by organizing guilds, quests, and bounties for contributors to execute.
• Weekly community voting on important events and topics.
• Fostering an environment to encourage local impact makers and contributors to connect and collaborate

In the Pipeline & Under Research

• Onboarding local community leaders and their organizations to web3 to foster a collaborative network leveraging blockchain for community coordination.
• Expanding Upe Impact and Upe Vote for more local use cases.
• Forking Upe for other nearby communities.
• Experimenting with various sources of income potential to position Upe as a “naturally’ public but monetizable goods that can be funded through commercial channels by tweaking them a bit” (Vitalik, The Revenue-Evil Curve) Our sources of funding are predominantly public goods funding mechanisms like Gitcoin QF rounds, direct donations & grants. Please help sustain our community by adding us to your cart & donating!

Learn More

• Check out our site
• See Upe Impact
• Explore our Newsletter