The Acorn Collective wants to make crowdfunding free
First we need to learn about what is crowdfunding before we could jump into knowing what is Acorn Collective to understand what they are planning to do.
Crowdfunding, the concept of raising many small contributions through an online funding platform, first appeared in the early 2000s, but it was only after the launch of Indiegogo in 2008 and Kickstarter in 2009 that crowdfunding gained considerable traction (Freedman & Nutting, 2015). Since its founding till August 2017, Kickstarter has channelled over USD 3.2B from more than 13 million backers to fund almost 130,000 projects. Moreover, Indiegogo has raised more than USD 1B in funding. In terms of ICOs, over USD 3B was raised in 2017 alone (as of November).
What is Acorn Collective?
The company that would create a platform that truly supports founders. They want to accept and support rather than reject and ignore. Acorn will never reject a legal and ethical project with the use of their project approval criteria to evaluate every detail of the project that needs support, this way we can avoid scam ICO’s and appreciate more of legitimate one. Favorable on the side of investors for Acorn Collective would analyze and research first before it can go to them (Lesser research and more trust).
Why Blockchain and Why an ICO?
We want to promote social enterprise globally by making crowdfunding free and more open. Current fee models are typically 5% in platform fees and 3–5% in transaction fees. This is a drain on startups looking for funding and is an easy thing to fix. Using blockchain for transactions means we can expect to all but eradicate transaction fees, with only minimal Ethereum network fees. These have been negligible in the past. Funding via an ICO means we can aim to eradicate the 5% platform fees for crowdfunding. If successful, an ICO would give us the resources to implement our Revenue Generation Mechanisms, which we intend to use to support this platform and keep it free to use.
Competitive Advantages
The Acorn Collective will have to compete with large, established platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, as well as new digital currency based platforms such as KickICO and FundYourselfNow. In a nutshell, here’s how we plan to be better and grow our user base
We are completely free for our users — Other platforms charge between 4% to 10% in fees.
The crowdfunding market is still in its infancy, with a potential to reach anything from USD 90B to 1 trillion per year by 2025 (World Bank, 2013; MyPrivateBanking, 2015). We’ll allow most legal projects to list on our platform irrespective of where the project originates from and irrespective of each project’s type. Project types could include but are not limited to commercial, creative, research, charity and personal causes. We wish to expand project exposure in new markets where previous access and competition are low.
Goods from successful projects can automatically be listed and sold on the Acorn Marketplace with no fees for campaign founders. 1.3 A Note on Emerging Markets Acorn Collective Whitepaper / Introduction .
Subject to the success of our ICO, we have designed Token Growth & Stability Mechanisms (more particularly described in Chapter 4 of this Whitepaper) intended to increase the value of OAK starting after token distribution. These mechanisms include:
The Project Incentive Fund will seek to provide generous starting bonuses to incentivize early adopters and reward recruitment of founders, backers and token users into our ecosystem. This can be a double accelerator — not only will the platform be free but it would also reward those generating early traction with incredibly generous incentives. It’s a mechanism to employ a huge marketing budget in an area where it should conceivably allow rapid growth for the platform and token.
Our Liquidity Reserve is intended to mitigate OAK price fluctuations related to large campaign payouts.
Subject to obtaining the required license or establishing a relationship with an existing licensed insurer, we intend for backers to have the option of buying Project Backer Insurance. For an additional fee, they could insure themselves up to the full value of their commitment against the possibility of project failure. We hope this will lower some of the objections to pledging funds.
Affiliate Rewards system: If implemented, this would provide rewards for anyone who can successfully recruit new users to participate in our platforms and therefore use OAK and our ecosystem.
Frictionless OAK Purchases: We intend to connect with the APIs of exchanges and popular wallets to integrate them into our platform, creating a frictionless transaction environment.
Partnerships: We intend to actively explore partnerships with campaigns created on Acorn Hub as well as 3rd party platforms to integrate OAK and increase its utility
OAK listing: We will endeavour to achieve an early listing of the OAK token on digital currency exchanges, shortly after completion of the ICO. This would ensure contributors have a viable exit strategy as well as to allow new users into our ecosystem.
- All of the above features and systems are intended to generate demand for the OAK token in the face of a permanently fixed supply.
ACORN Collective would develop
The Acorn Hub
Our vision is for the Acorn Hub to be the centrepiece of the OAK ecosystem, on which founders create their crowdfunding campaigns. Backers use OAK to fund these campaigns in return for rewards (and possibly equity in the future). In effect, we leave it up to the community and its collective wisdom to decide which projects are worthy of their support.
Uniquely for crowdfunding, our guiding principle is minimal intervention. The platform should encourage users’ creativity by keeping rules, requirements and intervention to a minimum.
Project Approval Criteria
A short, but robust screening process will be implemented to analyse projects’ compliance. Two or more project moderators will perform an initial check. They will flag any potential prohibited projects for further review. This will include scrutiny by legal experts, as well as potentially an ethics board and finally a community vote. Any projects deemed illegal will not be approved. Legal, but otherwise ethically questionable projects will be reviewed by an ethics board and, if still undecided, a community vote.
Acorn Marketplace
Bridging the gap between campaign and future profitability
The Acorn Marketplace will be a post-campaign retail platform for goods and services that were successfully funded on The Acorn Hub, provided at no additional cost to Acorn founders. This will provide instant visibility while letting founders get a free and effective new sales channel to reach users who have already expressed an interest in crowdfunding and the projects.
While platform access is free for Acorn founders, we will also accept innovative 3rd party products for a small commission. The aim is to add value to the marketplace, Acorn founders and the OAK token, in the form of increased utility.
Transactions
We aim to initially allow payments in both fiat currency and OAK tokens. As the market capitalization of OAK and the number of users increase, we hope the use of fiat currency on our platform will decrease naturally due to the higher transaction processing fees incurred from fiat payments. Once again, we hope by increasing the utility and demand of OAK in the face of its fixed supply, we can generate long-term upward pressure on the value of OAK.
Acorn Local
We want the Acorn platform to have a real, positive impact on the economies we operate in. As described in this document, our strategy in developing countries is to actively foster access on a local and regional level. Conceivably, a product of this will be communities where the number and concentration of post-funded Acorn projects is particularly high. We aim to provide a simple payments app in these areas that allow consumers, retailers and suppliers to trade using OAK. This can give backers and founders added utility for tokens and the advantage of secure currency exchange afforded by blockchain.
Why OAK Value Will Grow?
OAK is a deflationary token; with a fixed supply cap, the price of OAK is determined purely by demand. Demand is driven by the number of users of OAK and its utility. Thus, all our mechanisms meant for maximizing growth in our platforms will automatically also work to increase the OAK price.
Acorn Support — Campaign and Business Services
Where other platforms have given rise to a thriving but largely unvalidated secondary support market, we intend to provide genuine support and value through our range of Acorn Support products.
Crowdfunding requires a robust marketing plan and the ability to execute it. Founders may need to produce pitch decks, landing pages, financial modelling and technical roadmaps. Particularly because the Acorn platform is open access, plenty of great campaigns will still need expert support.
By introducing first-rate services at the right price, and with payment plans that are accessible, we can ensure that founders are protected by a quality service while giving them all the tools they need to be great platform advocates.
“Price is what you pay, value is what you get” — Warren Buffett
Overall this is a great project that needs attention. Not for businessman or bigger companies but this project is a true innovation that blooms out because of the blockchain. I bet every experienced investor of the crypto industry would love to see this and invest.
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Whitepaper :
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1PbmmXatTeAODdsWUl4bmRJOW8/view?usp=drive_web
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https://web.facebook.com/TheAcornCollectiveICO/
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https://twitter.com/AcoCollective
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