Atlantis DAO
Developed in partnership with Mercy Corps Ventures. Read the full report here.
Atlantis utilizes a DAO structure and crypto rails to coordinate natural resources.
Website: https://www.atlantians.world
HQ: Singapore
Active Markets: Chikmagalur, India; further expansions in progress.
Problem Addressed
As India has sustained rapid population growth over the past half century, resource demand has often outpaced supply. Water availability in India declined by 75% over the last 60 years, while the country’s population has grown by more than 1 billion people since 1950. As available water has declined, the time it takes for individuals to collect water consumes a significant portion of daily life: nearly 54 percent of rural Indian women spend an estimated 35 minutes each day acquiring water; rural and drought-affected areas report a 22 percent increase in school dropout rates as children spend time collecting water.
Project Description
Atlantis DAO aims to create a system where communities and businesses are rewarded to reduce emissions and achieve self-sustainability (through access to essential resources, like water), by making it easy to create new impact credits that help users earn while having a positive impact on the environment.
Mercy Corps Ventures partnered with Atlantis DAO to launch a new pilot in rural India that developed a decentralized peer-to-peer water network for underserved groups to access clean water resources, while providing the opportunity to earn income through incentive schemes. Using an engaging, gamified app that felt familiar to rural smart phone users in Chikmagalur, India, Atlantis leveraged a token ecosystem within a simple mobile application user interface to address complex coordination and market-shaping challenges in key ways: coordinating transactions and interactions of a complex web of actors through blockchain; incentivizing behavior with on-chain tokenomics, compensating participants for performing water production behaviors such as collecting, testing, or distribution; streamlining administration and coordination with automated smart contract functionality; and improving security and transparency through an auditable blockchain-based ledger.
The Citizen App and its in-app marketplace provided a single location to collaboratively coordinate and compensate the assessment, production, and distribution of clean water. Users could accept challenges related to clean water production; buy clean water and water filtration and testing devices; sell clean water that had been validated through the app’s ecosystem via codified testing processes; and access information about conservation.
Business Data
Status: Active
Constituency Served: General public, climate-impacted communities
Networks: Ethereum, Polygon
Known Investors: Mercy Corps Ventures
Additional References: Pilot Launch Article
Progress to date
Mercy Corps Ventures and Atlantis DAO launched and concluded its successful first pilot in 2023. After launching its application and a series of community events to onboard users in the community, the Atlantis team made a series of improvements to the app to streamline processes and its tokenomics. At the conclusion of the pilot, users overwhelmingly agreed that the app had improved access to clean water and community processes around clean water over existing resources and processes.
Atlantis DAO plans to continue involvement with their water endeavors in rural India. In parallel, Atlantis is planning expansion into additional countries and markets to address coordination around other key resources, including energy. Atlantis’ founders are drawing lessons from this initial pilot to enhance the flexibility of the Citizen App’s resource coordination, to open their model to applications beyond water access.
Business Model
Atlantis supports activities through project fees launched on their platform, commission on in-app sales, and software subscription fees.
Traction
The Atlantis pilot served a population of 45,000 over an 11 month period, engaging 3,859 people in essential water-related activities via a mobile phone app.
84% of pilot participants agreed that the pilot improved water conditions in their community. The pilots coordination efforts created over 440 new informal jobs, with 30% held by women.