Democratizing Crowdfunding with Acorn Collective

Acorn Collective is building what it believes to be the first crowdfunding platform that is free and open to projects from any country. It accomplishes this using its blockchain platform and its native token, OAK. By pledging to never reject a legal and ethical project, Acorn aims to democratize access to funding and support founders, especially those in emerging and developing markets who have a difficult time attracting capital.

The Acorn ecosystem consists of three main components: Acorn Hub, Acorn Market, and Acorn Local. Acorn Hub is where project backers can contribute OAK tokens to fund projects. In exchange, they may receive rewards, equity, or other incentives for funding a given project — the exact reward is entirely up to the specific project. Next, Acorn Market is a retail platform for projects that successfully met their backing goal. This allows them to easily start their initial retail push post-campaign at no additional cost to the project founders. Finally, Acorn Local is an app, targeted especially towards those in developing nations, that allows consumers, retailers and suppliers to seamlessly trade OAK tokens. This keeps tokens circulating in the Acorn ecosystem rather than on exchanges, and may also be useful for businesses to extract additional insights about the products in the platform.

Beyond those key components, some of the platform’s main features are:

Free Crowdfunding: The platform does not charge a platform fee, which is clearly preferable to the 5%+ typically charged.

All Legal Projects: The Acorn platform will never reject a project as long as it is legal and not harmful to others. This allows both smaller, local projects, as well as larger projects to be funded on the platform.

Any Country: The platform can be used in any country, so those in emerging nations as well as developed nations will be able to participate.

Liquidity Reserve: The Acorn team maintains a reserve intended to provide liquidity for large campaign payouts. This protects against large price fluctuations while the OAK token is in its early stages and is likely not very liquid on exchanges.

Project Backer Insurance: Backers of projects will have the option to purchase insurance should the project fail. This makes backing less risky, as they can purchase insurance to significantly reduce their exposure to the project’s risk.

Overall, the Acorn Collective’s project seems like a clear use of blockchain technology. Its application toward accessible, transparent crowdfunding seems like a great way to democratize access to project backing to those who were previously unable to access to funding. The project seems to have a competent team, with with members skilled in blockchain development, cybersecurity, and marketing (among other things). The Acorn project’s main token sale will begin on April 28.

Disclaimer: This article is not meant to be investment advice, and is strictly informational.

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Democratizing Crowdfunding with Acorn Collective was originally published in Hacker Noon on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.