From zero to hero: AidCoin highlights of 2018
By: Aidcoin Team
Tags: Fundraising, Blockchain, Charity, Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin

2018 with all of its ups and downs saw the whole journey of AidCoin: from its very first steps as a fundraiser with a mere idea of a product to a certain state of maturity where we already had a showcased technology and developed connections within both charity and blockchain sectors. We’ve passed many milestones on this way and today we would like to share the highlights.

AidCoin ICO

Roughly a year ago, on January 16th, we closed our ICO in a record time for Italy — just 90 minutes — raising an overall sum of 14,333 ETH, which back then amounted to $15 mln. Given the outstanding nature of our project, we were especially glad to see that people are so keen to support the good side of the blockchain and use this technology for helping charities rather than simply making profits.

Product Development

Since we had gained enough visibility while preparing for our token sale and successfully raised the funds needed to bring AidCoin to life, in the following months we decided to put all our efforts into developing the product.

As planned in our roadmap, we started with creating AIDChain — the core of our product — a platform, which gathers donors, charities, and their service providers, enabling full traceability of donations. It was ready by the end of Q1 and then AIDPay widget followed up ahead of the timeline thanks to the true dedication and enthusiasm of our programmers.

Moreover, once everything was launched and tested, we improved AIDPay to enable more partnerships with other crypto projects and introduced DAI stable coin as a new reserve coin of AIDChain in order to get rid of volatility that’s been hindering more charity registrations.

Charities

While part of our team was busy with IT development, the rest was involved in business development: first of all, we wanted to find users — both charities and donors — to test our product.

Thanks to our founding company’s network of charities, we had an opportunity to connect with top charities straight away thus showing a good example to smaller charities. Within a couple of months, we managed to get the world-famous WWF to join us.

It embraced the concept of AidCoin after attending our educational crypto workshop for charities, which became the first of its kind in Italy and opened the doors into the blockchain world for many local & international charities. However, the current legal status of crypto and its novelty impede the immediate registration of those charities and we still wait for the sphere to mature before onboarding them.

Donors

On the other hand, we were hustling to get more crypto donors and the best way to do that on that stage was to involve other crypto projects on a win-win basis. Our team kept traveling around crypto conferences establishing better connections with our fellow ICOs and in the end, we ripped some fruits. We partnered with several big ICOs, who either used our tech to enable crypto donations from their own products, e.g. UTRUST, or donated some of their funds to charity, like CanYa. We also partnered with blockchain events, such as BlockShow by CoinTelegraph to spread the idea of crypto charity among the crypto crowd and find more individual donors.

Community Development

Aside from finding users, we always aimed at sustaining and growing our community and increasing our visibility in both charity and blockchain sectors.

Some of the successful activities we undertook in this direction include our Japanese campaign, which got 35k retweets overnight, or our charitable auctions with blockchain luminaries, such as Roger Ver, founder of Bitcoin Cash, Ryan Taylor, CEO of Dash, Brock Pierce, Chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, and others. As a result, by the end of the year, our overall community grew from a couple of hundreds of followers to 45k.

Listings

Since our community is the main source of our success, we not only try to grow it but also sustain it and reward it. We have always been in touch with it on Telegram and did our best to respond to all its needs, and since one of its first and most obvious requests was token liquidity, we had tons of negotiations with exchanges. Within just one month after the ICO, we got listed on Bitfinex & Bancor. Bittrex, Upbit, and Coinswitch followed later.

We also wanted to thank our community for believing in us and scheduled 3 airdrops which took place on April 16th, July 16th, and October 16th. Overall, we sent 2,687,526 AID tokens to 1,294 token sale contributors who haven’t moved their AID tokens throughout these 9 months.

Real Life Showcases

Creating the product and drawing people’s attention to it is just one side of our activity, or a preparation. Once it’s done, the product needs to be actually used, and that’s what’s been happening during the last several months.

In summer, we launched the first ever fully blockchain-based fundraising campaign where our charity partner in Kenya spent the funds in crypto to help a local school.

Then, in autumn, we launched another campaign with Vivienne Westwood and it not only became the first campaign to use DAI as the main coin but also proved to be a great chance to promote AidCoin cause many celebrities as Kate Moss shared it on their social media.

Summary

Of course, that’s not all that happened in 2018, there were many other interesting and pleasant moments, for example when our founder was nominated by Forbes in 100 under 30 but in this post, we wanted to mention only the key points in our history.

We thank you all for helping us to kickstart our project in early 2018, growing with us throughout the year and not leaving despite the crypto winter. Your support inspires us to move forward and bring even more positive news for AidCoin, our community, and the charity world in 2019!