How Seeds is working to transcend the idea that "it takes money to make money"

So I started buying Bitcoin back in 2013, just after the Feds had seized $28 million worth from the illicit website Silk Road, which was a sort of Ebay for anything you could think of that was illegal. Because one could pay with Bitcoin anonymously (and Bitcoin was the only cryptocurrency going), it was the payment method of choice.

The existence of platforms like this, and Bitcoin’s association with them, went a long way toward making cryptocurrency generally seem sketchy or suspicious to the mainstream population for many years, and there are still vestiges of that sensibility present today.

A screenshot of Silk Road’s site after the U.S. government shut it down.

But the former stock trader in me saw an opportunity.

When the Feds seized Silk Road’s Bitcoin, the price on the market dropped significantly, to about $90 each. I figured Bitcoin was probably heading up long term, and so I bought as many as I could afford on this dip.

My idea turned out to be right, and the trade became profitable even more quickly than I might have expected. By January of 2014, a few months later, Bitcoin was around $1,100 USD.

A screenshot from a Coindesk article published in January of 2014.

I was elated. But there was a problem.

Seeds was incorporated in February of 2013, and I had been working on it for some time before, even spending the night in a Nairobi jail in July of 2012 in the process (a story which deserves its own space). But no matter how much grit I showed, investors were uninterested in putting money into the project.

The reason behind at least of portion of this had to do with me not knowing what I was doing, like at all. This was my first startup. I was also almost entirely unconnected to networks of wealth.

This, of course, is a relative thing. I was born in the United States, and for the duration of my life, it has been the richest country in the recorded history of this world.

My family was the “rich” family in a town of less than 1000 people in rural Ohio, where there was a big opioid problem, and a lot of poverty - but I didn’t have to take out student loans to go to an expensive private university.

I had met some seemingly “legitimately rich,” connected people’s kids while attending Duke, but there wasn’t anyone I knew to go to to try and raise angel funds. At the end of the day, I had to start from scratch regarding figuring out how to convince rich people to give us the money we needed to keep Seeds alive, to get it to sustainability itself.

This was just the way the world worked, and at the time, I didn’t question that.

But as I noticed that the male startup founders around me seemed to be raising funds from investors a lot more easily than I was, I became angry. I started to see that “startup investing” seemed to be a lot harder to navigate for women, because of its endemic misogyny. It was the same problem I had seen when I was a professional stock trader.

So my successful Bitcoin trade became a life raft. I sold my Bitcoin to pay my team, to keep Seeds going. There didn’t seem to be any other option.

If there had been - if not for misogyny in startup investing - perhaps I could have held on to that Bitcoin as it continued on, recently cresting $60K. If I had been able to do so, today I would be filthy rich, and I would be giving a ton of that money away to people in need.

**

It happened again in 2017. I had started buying ETH at around $17 in February or so of that year, following the team’s address of issues that had led to a hard fork the year before.

All the activity in Ethereum - many so-called “Initial Coin Offerings”, or ICOs - combined with other factors, like the recent Bitcoin halvening, made for another bullish sector run. By December, ETH had surged past $1400. It January, it had been in the single digits.

2017 was perhaps the most difficult financial year I personally ever had, the trough after more than 7 years of financial hardship. Seeds had a bit of revenue, but not enough to support the team. And investors continued to be non-responsive.

So I had to sell all of my cryptocurrency to pay bills once again. If I hadn’t been forced to do so - if I had been able to hold - I could have enjoyed ETH prices of around $2K as of this writing.

In hindsight, I am grateful for these experiences, mostly because of what they made me realize we must shape Seeds to become. The old economic system rewards people who already have money in seemingly myriad ways. If you don’t already have money, you likely have no choice but to trade your time to get some, and there are only so many hours in a day. If you have to work a minimum wage job, with a salary of $7.25 an hour in the United States, the system is quite clearly set up against you. How can a person survive within those constraints, let alone get ahead?

And so SEEDS is working to transcend this issue by design.

Because anyone can redeem a single SEED to make a Request for Help of any amount of money in USD, it can prevent more of us from having to go through what I did - from being forced to sell all of our cryptocurrency, or something else that is precious to us, because there is no other way to get the funding we need to survive.

A SEED is still needed in order to activate the request, and some ETH is needed in order to send the SEED - which is cost-prohibitive for way too many, until the team behind Ethereum addresses this issue via their ongoing 2.0 update. They have said publicly that they expect this particular challenge will be solved no later than July of 2021.

But as the largest Request for Help our community has redeemed to date was for $10,000 USD, to help a female U.S. military veteran and senior citizen, Alexis, buy a used mobile home that was habitable (because her old mobile home wasn’t), this is a substantial improvement over the old way.

Alexis redeemed a single SEED to make this request, and was able to do so even in the midst of economic challenges. The notion that “it takes money to make money” did not apply here in the same way.

In the future, we imagine a world in which anyone can redeem a SEED to buy their dream home, or fund the feature film they have been dying to make. Or pay for a new heating system for their home. Or throw a party for an old friend.

We want SEEDS to support artists, and all creators, so that we can step our of scarcity, and into the true purpose we came to earth to fulfill, unencumbered by the old systems of lack.

If you’d like to join us in this mission, we invite you to help someone in need and receive SEEDS in thanks.

Appreciate you!

Rachel