Engaging The Smart Crowd: How a Decentralized Crowdfunding will utilize the Power of the Community

One of the projects that I've been following as of late is Pledgecamp, a decentralized Crowdfunding that looks to help businesses fundraise. For once, we've got an ambitious project that has the potential to compete with existing rivals; Kickstarter & IndieGoGo. Pledgecamp is building a community and has unqiue structure that foster engagement, to read up more about it, read the original post to be found on PledgeCamp official Medium Publication.

The mechanics behind Pledgecamp’s native ecosystem

Backers are one of the most critical components of the crowdfunding ecosystem. With current day options however, backers are limited to investing funds. They do not have official options to contribute to their favorite projects in ways beyond investment.

So we decided to take it a step further.

Our team realized that in order to create a more dynamic ecosystem, it was necessary to capture backer interest beyond the funding stage. To that end, the Pledgecamp platform will host a native “Smart Crowd”. This crowd will be an empowered user base that contributes through two primary functions:

1. The Gig Economy
2. Becoming a Moderator

The Gig Economy

By leveraging blockchain technology and our native PLG (Pledge Coin) token, we aim to build an open and decentralized model of innovation. The platform utilizes a gig economy wherein the creators can hire temporary workers from our Smart Crowd when needed. The Smart Crowd can perform the following tasks, aka “bounties”:

• Content Creation: Create YouTube videos, blog posts, infographic creation, logo/branding design, etc.
• Social Media Promotion: Provide exposure for the creator’s campaigns by sharing links, retweets, posting to Facebook, Instagram, etc.
• Survey Creation: Fill out surveys to help collect market research data.
• Localization/Translation: Translate marketing material, product descriptions, or product manuals into additional languages for greater reach.

The above-mentioned bounty possibilities constitute Pledgecamp’s internal gig economy which can be automated, scaled, and tracked across the globe. Incentivizing these activities through monetization will empower users to express their passion and skill sets to grow the creator’s project.

Becoming a Moderator

Pledgecamp uses two tokens, Pledge Coin (PLG) and Camp Share (CS). PLG is an ERC-20 utility token which is used to pay for and reward various services within the ecosystem. If a user chooses to stake their PLG tokens, they will be rewarded with the CS tokens. A Camp Share is a non-exchange token that allows users to achieve Moderator status and earn compensation from the listing fees collected by the platform.

Here are some important points about the CS token and achieving Moderator status:

• User must perform KYC and meet eligibility requirements for their jurisdiction (in order to acquire CS).
• PLG is transferred to a non-trading “staking” smart contract.
• CS is awarded to the user at a fixed 1:1 ratio. 5% of the token supply is to be used to supplement the earnings of early CS holders, so it pays to get CS early on.
• A minimum balance of 100,000 CS is required to achieve Moderator status.
• Burning CS will return an equivalent number of PLG after a 30 day vesting period, reversing the stake.
• As the demand for CS increases, more and more PLG tokens will get locked up within the ecosystem, decreasing its overall supply.
• Moderators must maintain the overall health and well-being of the Pledgecamp ecosystem by removing behavior violations like scam projects, abuse, illegal activity, etc.
• As a reward, the total campaign listing fees generated within the system are shared amongst the Moderators. Pledgecamp is aware that in its nascent stage, the number of campaigns listed will be less, which is why 50 billion PLG (5% of the initial token allocation) has been kept aside to reward the Moderators in the early days.

Conclusion

Pledgecamp wants to build an ecosystem where creators and backers can work synergistically with each other to organically grow their crowdfunding ecosystem. To do that, the creation of a Smart Crowd is absolutely critical.

Since the incentives are tied together so intimately, all parties can work together as a team to scale their projects. We look forward to having you be a part of our future Smart Crowd!