Helios is a crypto-powered solar investment fund, focused on providing high impact, high return solar investment opportunities sourced globally from our network of trusted partners. The entirety of our operations will be open-source, publicly available on the Harmony blockchain to ensure maximum transparency, accountability and impact.
In our fight against climate change, we’re bringing blockchain technology to the real world, working together with climate experts, builders, and investors to shift the public perception of crypto from dark money to green money while doing our part to save the world in the process.
Our goal is to eliminate 10M tonnes of CO2 emissions by 2030. We’ve charted a clear path to get there, beginning with our first solar installation coming online in January 2022. So far we’ve bootstrapped $250,000 from friends, family and a handful of strategic angels to test our investment hypothesis. Once tested, we’ll be rolling out our growth marketing campaign in February 2022, trumpeting our mission on Twitter, crypto/climate slack groups, and through our extensive networks.
Our team was drawn to Harmony by your vision of multi-chain collaboration and international approach to blockchain development and ecosystem building. We were personally inspired hearing Li speak at the Harmony One event in San Francisco and look forward to contributing directly to building out this visionary ecosystem.
Proposal ask
$50,000 Launch grant to invest in tech development
Metrics for success
VentureDAOs face increased regulatory scrutiny which has led us to prioritize thoroughly-vetted, KYC/AML compliant users rather than the usual flood of folks you see in most DAO discords, however we are growing at a steady clip. We will be deploying our first $250,000 in mid-January and hope to reach $1.5m of deployed capital by the end of February.
We plan to resume reviewing grant proposals after the holidays, the first week of January. In the meantime, we would love to have the Harmony community participate to ask questions and provide feedback.
If you have more details to add, please do so by replying to this thread. Thank you again and we look forward to catching up after the holidays.
I happen to be building a pipeline of on-site solar projects (primarily for commercial farmers, but in general commercial/industrial users) across Southern Africa. Would love to connect with your team to learn more about HeliosDAO.
We’re quite excited to announce that we’ve negotiated and secured our first round of solar investments over the holiday season! We’ll be financing 4 solar installations, located in India, through a combination of fiat and stablecoins.
These 4 sites will be fully operational by the end of January, producing power, reducing carbon emissions and producing strong returns for our investors.
These initial investments will serve as a proof of concept, validating our investment thesis and proving we can effectively deploy capital (both fiat and crypto) across the world into high impact, high return solar projects. Once proven, we will open the investment floodgates and begin funding dozens more solar projects as we move swiftly toward our ambitious roadmap goals.
We hope you’ll join us for the journey, it’s going to be excellent!
This initial batch of solar installations is primarily a test to prove we can navigate the legal and regulatory complexities of foreign direct investment. Thankfully, we have strong local partners who are assisting a great deal in sorting through the extensive paperwork. Teamwork makes the dream work!
In terms of impact, these four installations will be generating approximately 500 kWh of power, offsetting more than 5 metric tonnes of CO2 this year. That said, this is only the beginning, a small trickle of power compared to the impending flood once we have the confidence to take on all the investment interest we’ve received.
Completely agree on compounding interest, it’s a difficult thing to understand but hopefully the graphic above helps people understand how powerful it can be. For context, that graph implies absolutely 0 additional investment beyond the first year, that massive impact is solely compound interest hard at work. There’s a reason Einstein described compound interest as “the 8th wonder of the world”.
To further align this proposal to Harmony’s launch grant category, can you please explain how this will fit into our Launch grant milestones as per below:
Applications of each launch must have prototyped a feature-full product. Harmony helps incubate these founding teams with product development, fundraising, and talent recruit.
We recommend a $50K equity-free contribution each:
$10K after launching a feature-complete product on our testnet,
$10K after forming a DAO with 5-out-of-9 multisig with our DAOs,
$10K after launching on our mainnet with audit,
$10K after 1K daily active users (with launch video, full PR promotion),
$10K after 10k daily active users (with a detailed roadmap, governance process).
Moreover, we recommend a 5-out-9 multisig account on Gnosis Safe with 3 governors from the project team, 3 governors from the project community, and 3 governors from Harmony DAOs – namely, ONEcommunityDAO, ONEdeveloperDAO, ONEincubatorDAO.
In all cases, we ask for 3-month exclusive campaigns with Harmony before more porting with other chains. We also offer follow-on investments – see 50 Investments ($20M) above; but, at the moment, you must have an outside, lead investor for us to match the funding terms. All codes, development materials and production assets must be fully open, preferrably with MIT or BSD licences; weekly updates must on sent on forum; and, all server deploys or mobile apps must be easily clonable.
As Harmony is EVM-compatible, it should be easy to deploy our prototype onto your testnet (and eventually mainnet).
In terms of forming of the DAO, what specifically needs to be done other than the Harmony Gnosis Safe? We’re open to your distribution of multisig keys.
Solar projects are bundled into pools which users can invest in via stablecoins. Each pool is a smart contract which connects with our harmony/gnosis safe. Users can track their investment (APY/return, power generated, carbon emissions reduced) via dashboards on our website.
Additionally, we will be publishing all off-chain activity (solar contracts, PPAs, fund transfers, etc) on our website and batch processing it on chain to ensure maximum transparency/accountability.
Thank you for your time @whitelotus! Appreciate the back and forth. However;
Unfortunately, your proposal is not ready for a Launch grant based on the guidelines at Apply for Grants or DAO due to the following reasons:
Applications of each launch must have prototyped a feature-full product. Harmony helps incubate these founding teams with product development, fundraising, and talent recruit. We recommend a $50K equity-free contribution each:
$10K after launching a feature-complete product on our testnet
$10K after forming a DAO with 5-out-of-9 multisig with our DAOs
$10K after launching on our mainnet with audit
$10K after 1K daily active users (with launch video, full PR promotion)
$10K after 10k daily active users (with a detailed roadmap, governance process)
We hope you continue to build on this concept and circle back when it is ready to be discussed further. Thank you for choosing Harmony.
to have the Harmony community participate to ask questions and provide feedback.
to have the Harmony community participate to ask questions and provide feedbacks.