We are a project dedicated to bridging the gap between real-world conservation and opportunities in blockchain. Our journey began in early 2020 and so far we have managed to partner with 5 endangered species, climate, and habitat conservation organizations from around the world; with more on the way.
Our goal is to work with these organizations to explore opportunities in blockchain to provide alternative and more sustainable ways to generate a stable revenue for conservation projects.
In our grant proposal, we have outlined a plan to utilize funding and tools from PoolTogether to build pools which will generate yield to provide consistent and stable revenue streams for the non-profit wildlife conservation organizations. Users will be able to participate in pools and win prizes, while part of the yield generated will go towards a featured non-profit organization, voted on weekly or daily by users. As well, part of the revenue generated from the genesis Black Rhino NFT Membership Pass drop will be added to the treasury, and included in the pool. Black Rhino is willing to commit $50,000 USD to this pool and is asking PoolTogether as well as the PoolTogether community for help build to this pool and realize this vision of using the power of PoolTogether to make a difference in conservation.
We are asking PoolTogether and the PoolTogether community for their support, as well as to contribute $50,000 to kick start this initiative, and to match the amount we plan to commit from the Black Rhino Genesis NFT sale. We are also asking PoolTogether to boost every $100 deposited from users by an additional $2.00, therefore increasing prize value.
Please vote to support this grant application, and our mission.
For more information on Black Rhino please visit: www.blackrhino.life
Hey Brandon,
First of all: welcome to the community! Thanks for reaching out with your proposal.
Iām very bullish on the public goods & ReFi space and believe this is the only direction for a sustainable future.
Overall, the PoolTogether community has been very open to finding ways that can help to leverage the protocol for charitable causes. 1, 2, 3
A recent example is No Loss Donations. Users can easily delegate their funds to a wallet held by Unchain Ukraine, effectively donating their prizes without losing custody of the underlying deposit.
The mechanism behind this is the PoolTogether Deposit Delegator. You can find more about that here, and more technical here.
I have a few questions to fully understand what you are building and how it would work.
Iād love to hear more about your journey since 2020. Could you give a quick overview of Black Rhinoās milestones?
What are those projects and on what do you partner with them?
Is it possible to share the grant proposal here? It would be helpful to know more about the plan you outlined.
Does that mean you are planning to deploy a PoolTogether v3 pool?
Thank you for your response and for your questions!
The journey began in part due to the global Coronavirus pandemic and the conditions of blockchain, in relation to sustainability, in late 2020. We saw a great opportunity to bring a more sustainable approach to blockchain, as well as open the doors to non-profit conservation organizations around the world who lost essential funding during the pandemic, to new exciting, opportunistic markets.
We do plan to launch a Pool which will be part of a larger Ecosystem More details will be coming soon, but weād like to work with PoolTogether on this and we need your help to get it started!
There is a lot of interest in and opportunity in blockchain, and non-profits should take notice.
Some of our milestones for the next 3-6 months include:
Launch Black Rhino Pool
Raise $50,000 for our non-profit partners
Secure $100,000 in TVL for The Black Rhino Ecosystem
Launch Black Rhino NFT project, for select members of Black Rhino Community
Build an online community of 50,000+
Secure an additional 3-4 partnerships with non-profit conservation organizations
Launch NFT rewards for users participating in Black Rhino Community as well as Pools
I hope I was able to answer your questions! If not, please feel free to join our Discord channel, that weāve recently launched, and message me directly! Iād be happy to answer any questions.
I want to call out that Black Rhino is a grant proposal. We encouraged them to post into the governance forum as there has been a consistent desire from the community for charity efforts. Grants would love to hear what the community thinks and how we can help (as grants and a community).
Thanks Brandon! I do have some more questions but letās keep the conversation in the open and stick to this thread.
What do you mean by launching a pool? Are you planning to use PoolTogether v3 or PoolTogether v4?
That pool will be part of a larger ecosystem. Are you referring to the Black Rhino ecosystem in that case? Could you expand on that, please?
Thanks for listing your future milestones! What about the past? What have been the milestones since 2020?
You want to raise $50k for your non-profit partners and secure $100k in TVL for the Black Rhino Ecosystem. In what ways will those $50k be raised? Is the plan to achieve this via NFT sales + yield?
Is Black Rhino going to pay those $50k out to the partners or will it be used to generate yield for them? Will those $100k be deposited into PoolTogether?
There are currently 80 Followers on the Black Rhino Twitter account. An online community of 50,000 sounds very ambitious. How are you planning to grow the community?
Your website speaks about Solana and Cardano. PoolTogether is native to the broader Ethereum ecosystem. On which chain(s) are you planning to launch the NFTs and deploy the pool?
I have numbered the questions so itās easier to reply to them, since its so many. I donāt want to come across as over-cautious and I hope you donāt feel overwhelmed by all the questions!
Iām all for conservation and finding ways to use blockchain technology for the good, but Iād love to understand the whole concept before agreeing to the use of treasury funds.
Sorry for the delayed response, but here are the answers to your questions:
We plan to launch with v4 and build out an ecosystem where users can participate in PoolTogether Pools through Black Rhino to directly support non-profit wildlife conservation.
Yes, we are currently planning to build out a larger ecosystem consisting of a few different features which will allow users to participate in PoolTogether Pools while supporting non-profit wildlife conservation organizations. The Black Rhino ecosystem will consist of a treasury, delegations, prizes, rewards, community initiatives, governance, NFTs and more! Ideally we will build a self-perpetuating ecosystem where the community can consistently support organizations and causes they believe in. The specific use case with PoolTogether is to have Black Rhino participants delegate tickets to Black Rhino (Treasury) or one of our non-profit partners. Prizes won by our non-profit partners will be allocated to them directly to be used for them to advance with their conservation efforts. Prizes won by Black Rhino will go to our Treasury in order to fund different efforts. Specifically the weekly Black Rhino giveaway pool for the community, where we will randomly select one wallet from all the Black Rhino participants that have delegated and award them a special edition NFT, as well as delegate a set amount of PoolTogether tickets to them as well. This weekly giveaway is just one way for us to incentivize Black Rhino participants to delegate to PoolTogether tickets to our different partners.
Since late 2020 we have been conducting research, building the team, and working on the project scope. We have spoken with many wildlife conservation organizations around the world to get a good understanding of their needs and interest in blockchain. We have also established working relationships and partnerships with non-profit conservation organizations such as VetPaw (www.vetpaw.org), and BioRescue (www.biorescue.org), as well as many others. Most of our research consisted of communicating with people within the conservation space, as well as exploring the best options in blockchain from a technical standpoint. As well, we spent 6 months building our launch team of 8 people to this point, with plans to expand and build as we continue to grow.
The plan is to raise funding through a genesis NFT launch, which is pending, as well as with support from PoolTogether Grants and the PoolTogether community. All funds raised from PoolTogether Grants and the PoolTogether community will be directly allocated back into PoolTogether Pools to kick start the Black Rhino ecosystem to start generating yield.
The 50k will be delegated to our non-profit partners who will be participating in the pool through Black Rhino. To break it down, 50% will be delegated to Black Rhino and the remaining 50% will go to our participating partners who are part of the Black Rhino ecosystem. The funds our partners win/receive from the PoolTogether Pools will be allocated to them directly and the 50k will allow us to launch this initiative and start to generate prizes for them.
As of right now we have a small social media presence, because we have only recently started working on social growth. The plan is, with the launch of the NFT project, as well as with the launch of the Black Rhino ecosystem with PoolTogether, to utilize part of the funding allocated to the Black Rhino Treasury to invest in growth and marketing on social media. This will be used to help grow the community as well as our presence on social media, and our goal is to have a strong online community of 50,000+ (Twitter, Instagram, Discord, Telegram) in 6 months. We are also finalizing a few strategic partnerships within the blockchain space which will help us with marketing ad well as with growing our brand, and expanding our reach.
The website will be updated this week to reflect updates. The original plan was to explore opportunities on Cardano because they put an emphasis on environmentalism and sustainability. This is very important to us and the partners we work with. As of right now, we are blockchain agnostic, but we will launch the first NFT project on Solana, because of the thriving NFT environment, as well as itās eco-friendly proof-of-stake consensus model. The DeFi protocols including the Pools, will be on Polygon for similar reasons as well as low fees.
We are also currently working on a front-end which directly integrates with PoolTogether and will allow users to participate directly through a dashboard, similar to the PoolTogether Ukraine Initiative.
We are a team of enthusiasts, environmentalists and developers who are excited by the opportunities that blockchain and web3 provide to give back do good, which is why we want to be as transparent and upfront as possible with the PoolTogether community!
I hope I was able to answer your questions. If you need any further clarification, please let me know. I am happy to answer any more questions.
You say you want to be transparent but I somehow still get contrary vibes.
Your Co-Founder Kaloyan Georgiev announced the launch Black Rhino NFT collection in July last year. What happened to it? All posts before March this year seem to have been deleted on Black Rhino Twitter. Could you explain why?
Going from now expected returns from a $50,000 deposit over a year would be around $4,000. 50% of that would leave you with $2,000 from which you are planning to fund all the other things and inorganic social media growth.
It looks like you have a project with a compelling mission and sound values. Being in the space since early or late 2020 (not sure, you said both in this thread) you should have already started investing in building your community much earlier. What happened in 2021 and why did no one stay from that last NFT launch?
Could you please elaborate further on the Wildlife Conservation Pool DApp proposed on March 14th in specific? Does this mean you were planning to deploy a PoolTogether fork on Cardano until just recently?
I am confused by all the blockchains. So there are NFTs on Solana and Prize Pools on Polygon. This giveaway pool - is that another pool than the PoolTogether v4 Prize Pool? Are these special edition NFTs on Polygon? Do you expect your users to be on both chains to use Black Rhino?
Iām green pilled and see myself as global citizen. Iāve studied Sustainable Development and am a big believer that our collective world has to work together to drive change now. It breaks my heart but so far I donāt have a good feeling about this partnership.
@Tjark Iām sorry to hear youāre getting contrary vibes, weāre trying to be upfront.
We do want to be as transparent as possible, hopefully I can clear up any confusion:
In July of last year, we did a test launch of 10 NFTs on multiple chains and multiple marketplaces to get a better feel of the environment and the market. However, we never officially announced it on our social channels, as it was a test. We designed the art in house and launched the pieces on TreasureLand and AirNFT on BSC, CNFT on Cardano, and SolanArt on Solana. We sold 3-4 pieces and donated the proceeds to VetPaw. We wanted to test the different chains and different marketplaces for experience purposes. Being inexperienced we needed to gain experience with minting, fees, and user interactions. Nothing appears on our twitter account prior to February 2022, because we lost ownership of our account, due to suspicious long-in activity, and had to delete the account before being able to retrieve our old username from Twitter and starting again.
The grant from PoolTogether is only part of the funding we will use in the Pools. Funds from the genesis NFT sale, as well as any other funds we receive, will also be allocated to PoolTogether as well. We formulated the idea in late 2020, and began working on it in early 2021. We spent most of 2021 planning, researching, testing, talking to wildlife conservation organizations and building out a proper team, as well as a proper vision for this project. We did not put much emphasis on growing social media until recently, only testing different growth and community building approaches.
Yes, we did apply for funding through Cardanoās Project Catalyst, which is a community governed funding platform for the Cardano ecosystem, three times actually. However, we were unsuccessful. We did not receive support from the community, and also quickly realized as well that the technical challenges of building on Cardano would consume too much funding and time. To this point, we have been a blockchain agnostic project, with plans to develop in an ecosystem which best fits our needs and is supportive of our long-term project goals. As well, we need to work within an ecosystem that supports environmentally conscious initiatives and has an eco-friendly approach. This is important to us, and our partners. After deliberating with our team, and our partners, we concluded that Polygon does meet our standards. But, āThe Wildlife Conservation Pool DAppā application came about first, after in January of this year, one of our newest team members introduced us to PoolTogether and suggested we explore opportunities to work within the PoolTogether ecosystem, or fork a version of a PoolTogether Pool onto Cardano, because we were already in the midst of the application process. PoolTogether exemplifies what our project is founded on, exploring new opportunities in blockchain and utilizing them for good. As a team we believe that PoolTogether could provide great opportunities for non-profit conservation organizations to explore sustainable funding opportunities, and our project will act as a conduit for organizations around the world to become more involved in blockchain markets.
Yes, the Giveaway feature will be on Polygon v4, as well as the NFT prizes. The initial genesis NFT launch will be on Solana because of an exclusive partnership we have secured with a popular NFT Marketplace which has agreed to host and help promote this first collection. I cannot disclose the marketplace at this time, but it will be announced soon. The funds from the NFT sale will be immediately transferred from Solana to a multi-sig Polygon wallet to be allocated to the Pools.
You can check out an official press release we put out last week with our partners Keep Nature Alive and BioRescue here, introducing the genesis NFT collection, which will support their mission:
I completely understand the way you feel and I feel it is good to be skeptical or cautious of projects claiming to be in support of non-profit organizations, especially in the climate and wildlife sector. This is why we have made it a point to partner with only legitimate non-profit wildlife and climate conservation organizations as well as on-board respected individuals in this field to help guide us. Please feel free to check out one of our project advisors, Professor Jose Etcheverry (https://euc.yorku.ca/faculty/jose-etcheverry/) Co-Chair of Sustainable Energy Initiative and Director of the International Renewable Energy Academy from York University in Toronto, Canada. He is a passionate environmentalist and conservationist with 25+ years of experience and is an official advisor and supporter of our project.
Everyone on our team is passionate about this cause and we are dedicating our time to bridging the gap between wildlife conservation and blockchain technology. We want to be part of the solution and help organizations around the world enter these markets, because we believe there is a lot of opportunity. There is a lot of interest from conservationists and scientists in blockchain markets, however we have learned that most lack the knowledge or resources to be able to pursue these opportunities. It is our mission to help these organizations explore these new opportunities, and we believe PoolTogether is one which can potentially provide these organizations with sustainable and consistent incoming funding which they can utilize for crucial day to day operations. This is also a great opportunity for PoolTogether to show itās use case and to show the potential of blockchain technology to be used for good and charitable causes around the world.
We want to receive community support as we believe this is a great opportunity for both of us to showcase use of blockchain for a higher purpose.
I hope I was able to clear up any confusion, please let me know what you think.
If you require any further information, please let me know!
