Launching Glo Dollar (with Brale)

Hi! From March-June of 2023, the Glo Foundation team was busy getting ready to finally launch our flagship product, Glo Dollar… and we did it! Glo Dollar is now officially live.

You can see our market cap counter on the top of glodollar.org now:

And you can read more about how we selected our issuance partner, Brale, and how the relationship works, here.

A big part of getting ready for launch was updating our website to reflect some ways in which Glo Dollar has evolved over time—for instance, clarifying that we donate all of our revenue from the coin to GiveDirectly, but we also share earnings from the reserves with Brale so that they may cover the costs of issuing the coin; and we also clarified that we haven’t made any donations yet. 

So we updated:

• Our homepage
• Our ‘about us’ page
• Vision and growth strategy
• How Glo Dollar works
• From Bootstrap to High Impact (this one is entirely new)
• The numbers
• Take the Glo pill: 9 reasons to be excited about Glo Dollar 

This was a big effort involving marketing, operations, and legal, and we’re very happy with how things turned out.

Upgrading our smart contract

Another critical component for launching was upgrading our smart contract to V3. The main reason we upgraded the code was to address a critical security issue (it would have allowed people to mint unlimited Glo Dollars by sending a balance to themselves). We also built a ‘permit’ feature, which allows web3 apps to request approval to spend users’ tokens without their needing to pay gas. You can read more about these changes, and how we have modified our change process,  in a blogpost from Garm Lucassen, our CTO.

Next up is getting Glo Dollar available on exchanges, which means working with market makers, liquidity providers, and OTC desks to make Glo Dollar available to consumers..

Other things we did:

• We wrote blogposts on embedded philanthropy and why we think GiveDirectly and cash transfers are great;
• We grew our early adopter community substantially to about 350 (we also post tweets when new people join, e.g. this one);
• We did a lot of work to prep for launching on exchanges that should be yielding fruit shortly 🤞
• We did a lot of outreach to DAOs, institutions, and companies that could hold Glo Dollars and thereby passively fight extreme poverty.

P.S. Right now we’re in Paris for EthCC,and we’re  looking forward to telling y’all about it when we get back.

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