Community-Driven Passive Income Generation with a Charitable Twist
How does one stand out in an ever-expanding sea of meme tokens? Being irreverent or whimsical with your name and messaging can draw some attention and maybe get a few laughs. You might even see a chance of going to the moon as you mock traditional financial institutions and the hype surrounding larger cryptocurrencies. Still, that initial excitement and engagement will almost inevitably fade. That is, unless, you inject your meme token project with sincerity and lasting real-world value.
Sheep Token ( SHEEP) is an up-and-coming DeFi project that’s taking those necessary steps to be considered in a serious light. Its creators decided early on that they wanted SHEEP to represent the community-building powers of the growing DeFi world. With that goal in mind, they’ve baked several community-focused features into their project. The most notable of those are weekly lotteries with a charitable twist, a forthcoming “rug pull avoidance” tool, their passive-income generating tokenomics, and their live relinquishing of the token’s dev wallet and all team ownership.
Of course, the idea of crypto-financed philanthropy is as old as Bitcoin itself. Still, the bulk of charitable donations within the crypto-realm have been associated with individual investors rather than platforms or projects. That’s changing as more and more DeFi projects are launching with the hope of incentivizing adoption through donation-laden tokenomics and community-building systems.
Sheep Token is utilizing donations as an incentive for token adoption and community engagement through an exciting and mutually beneficial Lottery Mechanism. Basically, the Sheep Token project will hold weekly lotteries to give away SHEEP tokens to its community members. 10% of those lottery winnings will be automatically donated to the World Vision Foundation. This organization will in turn donate actual sheep to villages in need throughout the world.
For obvious reasons, 2020 was a big year for charitable causes and donations. With the COVID-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, and a host of other globe-spanning issues, the idea of philanthropy grew to be increasingly top-of-mind for the average individual. As many of us sheltered at home, we were left with our electronic devices as our only means for staying in touch with the outside world. These events were combined with the rapidly expanding concept of globalism to create the perfect conditions for the rise of “humanitarianism from a distance”. Subsequently, there was a 25% surge in online charitable donations with a 3.4% overall year/year increase.
While the total amount of money donated to charity didn’t drastically increase in 2020, the actual number of individuals who gave to relief funds or organizations grew by over 7% from the previous year. We can draw useful parallels between this growth in individual contributors and the concurrent rise of retail stock and crypto trading. In many ways, these progressions are aligned with an overarching trend of the adoption of decentralized finance systems.
2020 saw a 2x increase in the number of charitable organizations opening their doors to crypto. According to Alex Wilson, Co-Founder of The Giving Block, there’s a good chance “we’ll start seeing some of the nonprofits getting more comfortable with actually holding on to the donations and not necessarily always converting them.” UNICEF has even begun accepting crypto with the intent of HODLing rather than immediately converting. As this trend continues, it opens the door for up-and-coming projects to donate more to charity with less risk of instantly devaluing their tokens.
While the world of charitable crypto might have an innocent and wholesome sheen to it, there’s always a dark and dangerous underbelly to any relatively new technology. Of course, untrustworthy projects and straight-up scams have littered the DeFi and cryptocurrency space since the early days of Bitcoin. That being said, according to recent FTC data, Americans have lost over $80 million to crypto-scammers in the past year alone. That’s a sharp 1000% increase from the previous year and highlights the often-risky Wild West nature of certain areas of the DeFi realm.
Rug pulls are one of the most common crypto-scams happening on DEXs at the moment. Sheep Token is taking an active stance against these malicious behaviors by offering a rug pull avoidance tool that will soon be available on their site. This on-site application will allow any crypto-holders to analyze their liquidity pools and token staking performance by connecting their wallets and checking for things like time-locked API calls, among other important elements. These types of API calls are typical signs of an upcoming rug pull or some other form of malicious activity. With the goal of supporting a transparent, legitimate, and community-driven DeFi world, Sheep Token’s platform will enable users to clearly see if any of their holdings are in jeopardy.
The real financial power of Sheep Token lies in its unique deflationary token ecosystem. They essentially reward token holders with passive income generation. This is done by charging an instant 6% transaction fee for all SHEEP tokens bought or sold. 3% of that fee is automatically burned while the remaining 3% is equally distributed to all SHEEP holders. This constantly reduces the total token supply and incentivizes holding while disincentivizing sell-offs. Their deflationary system allows for higher price floors and the eventual adoption of SHEEP as an actual form of border-less and friction-less currency.
Sheep Token is 100% community-owned and the project’s team is dedicated to total transparency and community-building. That’s one of the reasons they’ve committed to making weekly donations of actual sheep while engaging and exciting their holders through a lottery system. It’s also why they’re building tools to help investors avoid scams and why they’ve allowed their project to be fully audited by TechRate. As a DeFi project intent on building a truly fair and efficient global financial ecosystem, it makes sense for them to keep a lookout for actionable ways that they can make the world a more unified and healthier place while they grow.
The core ideals of DeFi often involve cutting out middlemen and creating an equal and fair distribution of financial opportunities. Those ideals are perfectly aligned with Sheep Token’s charitable donations that create real value and wealth for communities in need. A single sheep can have a huge impact on a struggling village, providing nutritious milk, wool, and eventually an entire flock of offspring. One might assume that the villagers would prefer to slaughter and eat the sheep right away. Much like the SHEEP token, however, the value of the sheep actually increases as it’s kept alive and cared for.
Originally published at https://medium.com on June 5, 2021.
