How SolLotto Enables Effective Altruism

What is effective altruism?

Effective altruism advocates the use of evidence and reasoning to determine how resources can be used in the most efficient ways to benefit those in need. Put simply, some charities have more of an impact than others. While there can be different ways to measure how much of an impact a charity is making, most of the time the improvements made to the quality and longevity of life are the more important aspects to be considered. Additionally there are straightforward methods of measuring the impact, such as the percentage of each dollar that actually goes to the charitable cause as opposed to funding the organization’s salaries, marketing and administrative fees.

How does SolLotto promote effective altruism?

Looking around at how charitable contributions flow today, we realized there was a huge opportunity to improve one of the most popular and accessible forms of donating to charity, the lottery. In the United States for example, an estimated 10.5 billion (USD) is spent annually in administering the lottery system itself (roughly 15% of the total revenues raised). In addition to excessive administrative fees, charitable contributions are often nontransparent, set with fixed organizations, and are even used as a substitute for properly allocating funding to key areas such as education. As most countries host some form of lottery, these problems are even bigger when viewed on a global scale.

When we first heard the term “effective altruism”, an idea sparked that a decentralized community-driven approach to allocate these funds during every drawing would make the altruism behind each purchased ticket more effective. By allowing the participating community to make the decision on a weekly basis we believe the charitable resources will be able to flow where they are needed most, when they are needed the most.

Why are Lotteries effective at raising funds for charities?

A game-like system such as the lottery provides some unique characteristics compared to adding a donation on to another service. A true lottery is fundamentally different from a required charitable contribution, a volunteered charitable contribution, and a winner-takes-all raffle system.

We believe the traditional lottery has succeeded in the United States in large part to the charitable donation that has always been a core component of the drawing. When someone purchases a lottery ticket, there are a few reasons for doing so that all operate in coordination with each other:

1) For a one-time and low-effort purchase, they have the opportunity to multiply the funds in epic magnitudes within an incredibly short and predictable timeframe. They are buying hope, dreams, and a chance at a life they most likely would not achieve in any other way.

2) They are supporting those same dreams for other people too.

3) They are participating in a “good” cause. “I know I probably won’t win but it’s fun, and I like to support XYZ”.

In our opinion, the charitable component is a large part of what separates the lottery from a slot machine. Charity combined with an ever growing pool when a winner isn’t chosen is what we believe makes the traditional ‘pick 6’ lottery so popular, as the purchase provides utility through social benefits even after the drawing has concluded. This is one of the reasons why some of the most successful marketing campaigns for existing traditional lotteries focus their message on the good deeds made possible by the donations of participants as opposed to the singular winnings of any individual.

How does a decentralized community-driven approach enable effective altruism?

We believe the most effective and fair way of reaching a decision is developing a system where everyone who has a stake in the game, also has a vote proportional to said stake. Participants with a greater stake are incentivized to become better informed as well as steward that information to the greater community. We plan to put in place a democracatic approach that is based on the stake of the donation, allowing the community to best allocate the funds to the most effective causes.

The charitable distribution voting will be limited to four charities in our traditional ‘pick 6’ lottery model. Depositors in our “No Loss Lottery” model will vote prior to the start of each drawing on which four charities will be included in the upcoming lottery and will have a vote equal to the amount they have staked. Based on the participation, we may include limits on how much share any one participant can gain regardless of how much they have donated in order to ensure the effectiveness of the protocol.

How does SolLotto determine which charities are worthy of being considered by the community?

The charities featured on our platform are manually reviewed and verified by the SolLotto team. Given the lack of transparency in the traditional monetary system, we must rely on the independent investigations of third-party organizations at this time. In the future we would like to encourage the development of blockchain auditing and ranking protocols from a decentralized network, composed of independent third-parties which accurately determine the true impact made to one’s quality and longevity of life. In our initial qualification system, we are currently look for a number of factors including but not limited to:

1. The ranking of the charity on charitywatch.org.
2. The ranking of the charity on charitynavigator.org.
3. GiveWell reports involving the charity’s effectiveness.

We require any charity featured on the SolLotto platform or it’s protocols to be registered and approved by at least one of the three organizations listed above. In order to meet our minimum quality requirements they must have achieved at least one of the following:

1. An “A-” Grade (or better) from charitywatch.org.
2. A score of at least 90 given by charitynavigator.org.
3. Listed in GiveWell’s top charities.

We accept recommendations for charities to be included for consideration by the SolLotto team from any member of our community. After receiving a recommendation, a SolLotto team member will manually verify the information provided before the charity is scheduled for final review and inclusion on the SolLotto platform.

Let’s build a better world together!

SolLotto’s alpha testing on our traditional lottery model is now live at https://app.sollotto.io, visit today and let us know what you think! We’d love to hear your opinions and suggestions on how we could improve the user experience. This feedback can be given in our Discord at https://discord.gg/SolLotto. We’ve also recently added a new ‘Charity Center’ section to our server and hope to become a one-stop shop for learning more about effective charities and the philanthropic efforts of our Solana ecosystem friends and partners!