Bringing investigative reporters into web3 by funding them retroactively through hypercerts

Story

My master's theses at the Columbia Journalism School looked at Silk Way Airlines, partly owned by the Azerbaijan President's daughter. My story found that they had taken part in $420 million in Pentagon contracts and a $400 million export-import bank loan guarantee.

The CEO resigned during the reporting of my story. Despite this huge impact, my investigation was grant funded from start to finish. It made me wonder: what if I were paid after achieving an outcome like the CEO resigning?

https://www.occrp.org/en/investigations/8493-airline-once-linked-to-azerbaijan-s-ruling-family-got-us-loan-guarantees-military-contracts-planes

Impact Markets

First proposed in 2014 by Paul Christiano, impact certificates are like carbon credits but along any impact vector. They represent an alternate approach to donating, where you 'buy' impact similar to how one might buy a t-shirt.

Protocol Labs has built out a web3 protocol for impact certificates (hypercerts.xyz) while Optimism has allocated millions of dollars in its retroactive public good funding (RetroPGF) rounds. However, they are mostly used by projects already in the web3 ecosystem - I am looking to leverage the same infrastructure for funding investigative reporters as and when their stories produce tangible outcomes like court cases, resignations, asset seizures or policy change.

If we succeed, newsrooms will mint hypercerts of outcomes arising from their story and effective altruist donors will purchase them. Unlike other cause areas, donors can verify the outcomes for themselves through other news reports and press releases in the aftermath of an investigation's publication.

Traction

• I have received approval from three citizen journalism media outlets (CGNet Swara, Gram Vaani and Video Volunteers) to upload their past database of 10,000 impact reports as hypercerts.

• Our project was identified by the Ethereum Foundation as being significant for creating retroactive funding mechanisms of subjective impact like journalism, for which Devansh was awarded the 2023 Next Billion Fellowship from the Ethereum Foundation

https://blog.ethereum.org/2023/08/07/nb-fellows-cohort-3

• voicedeck secured $9000 in prizes for winning best public goods funding project in the funding the commons hackathon. Created a customer interaction flow & code for converting a private impact database to hypercerts on Goerli

https://app.buidlbox.io/projects/hypercerts-media

• Scott Alexander a leader of the effective altruist movement featured voicedeck as part of our participation in his retroactive funding experiment ACX Mini Grants

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/impact-market-mini-grants-results

• Collaborating with designers, developers and product managers at Pollen Labs (privacy and scaling team at Ethereum Foundation) to build minimum lovable product by February end

Discord collaboration space : https://discord.com/invite/B7Gs95naev

Use of Funds

Money raised in this round will cover stipend for developers and our team ahead of product launch early next year

Past utilization:

1. The funds I raised in the beta round partially helped cover expenses to attend FTC 6th edition in Paris and EthCC. You can see the tweet thread here:

https://twitter.com/TheDevanshMehta/status/1680130881497726976

2. The funds I raised in GG18 partially offset my travel to Funding the Commons (FTC) 7th edition in Berlin on 7th and 8th September and the Global Investigative Journalism Network conference in Gothenburg, Sweden from 19th-22nd September

https://twitter.com/TheDevanshMehta/status/1704405030424445433?s=20