In September of 2018, the Virtual Economic Investment Academia Guild (VEIAG) will open a private sale for its pioneer project: A cryptocurrency token that makes investment transparent and philanthropy profitable. The cryptomarket has a bad rap right now, facing encroaching regulation, dramatic volatility, and a technology that many find hard to understand. Blockchain currencies are attractive to speculative tech investors willing to take a risk, but to most consumers they remain a millennial money pit. For VEIAG’s team, this constitutes a market failure — but not an insurmountable one.
In an ambitious business plan, their first goal is to protect VEIAG from the cryptomarket’s volatility. With a 25% allocation of all initial funds raised to gold bullion, their currency immediately gains a floor value in the most stable asset available on the market. This means investors won’t have to worry about losing everything if the market takes a turn. VEIAG’s next objective is to provide their investors with an easy path to understanding their token’s value. By allocating 75% of their funding to a series of projects focusing on sustainable development goals (SDGs), their token then accumulates a trackable value — the quarterly profits of which will be continually divided between gold bullion and reinvestment.
But in true cryptocurrency fashion, VEIAG wishes to uphold ideals, not just profit. Like Bitcoin was founded with the principles of speed, privacy, and decentralization in mind, VEIAG wants to produce transparency and social good. By focusing on SDG projects, VEIAG anticipates a high social return on investment (SROI). Through its detailed quarterly profit reports, it will communicate this value to token-holders as well as invite them to learn more about future projects under consideration. In blockchain technology, VEIAG sees an opportunity to increase investor participation and ownership over business strategy. Token-holders will be able to vote on proposed projects and decide where their investment will be applied. In a sense, VEIAG will act as an alliance of like-minded individuals with a common goal: to make a sustainable profit.
For Yan Filshtinsky, COO of VEIAG, the most exciting aspect of their token is its philanthropic origin. After almost a decade working in the financial industry, he wanted to do something different. “That didn’t have to be cryptocurrency,” he said. “To me, that meant helping people. I need to make a living, but I also want to make something that will positively impact the world.” To find this balance between profit and charity, Filshtinsky and his team have found a welcome guide in the United Nations Global Compact.
The UN’s Global Compact is a call for corporate behavior to align itself with SDGs. By joining as a partner, VEIAG has committed itself to pursuing projects that uphold the Compact’s principles on human rights, labour, environment, and anti-corruption. This noble cause has inspired VEIAG to focus on making a lasting impact in struggling regions. “There’s a difference between international aid and permanent solutions,” Filshtinsky says. “You can pour tons of money into a region and see no change once the money dries up.” To that end, VEIAG is investing in SDG projects that address fundamental infrastructure gaps in the developing world. By making targeted changes in supply chains and production processes, they aim to help economically depressed regions establish firm foundation for further development.
To accomplish what Filshtinsky calls “permanent aid,” VEIAG has completely reevaluated its investment process. Every project brought to investors will be exhaustively researched and formulated by experts. Their involvement will not simply be financial in nature. For each project, VEIAG collects a team of experts familiar with the region and the precise field addressed by the project. These experts will act as advisors through the extent of VEIAG’s involvement with the project, lending support and professional analysis to the men and women working on the ground. Though VEIAG’s team is remaining pretty tight-lipped about the exact nature of the upcoming projects (citing an understandable fear of pre-launch competition), Filshtinsky intimates that they are focused on improving agrarian production lines and access to medical supplies in rural areas. Ultimately, he hopes to see these improvements mirrored by other small companies within these regions in a sustainable pattern of development.
VEIAG has a bold vision of what finance should do for the world. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have already been applied to various charitable causes — for notable examples, look to the Pineapple Fund or RootProject. But VEIAG’s business plan goes further to address a variety of market failures. The fundamental redefinition of its token value is a deceptively simple plan with a lot of innovative energy. Through their dedication to transparency, and ethics, VEIAG’s model has the potential to restabilize a fractured market.
VEIAG will launch its token this fall with a private sale in September, to be followed shortly thereafter by a full Initial Token Offering (ITO). For more information and future announcements, visit VEIAG.com or find the team on twitter.
Source: Crypto New Media
