Introducing Deadweight Loss as a Service
I’m excited to announce our fintech startup Deadweight Loss as a Service is coming out of stealth after receiving $8M in seed funding from Emergent Ventures and Thiel Capital. Our platform makes charitable giving more efficient using the latest AI and blockchain technology. Our platform has two major innovations:
- OmniMatch™ will match any funding through our platform up to fifty cents on the dollar.
- Antidollars™ remove $1 of funding from an organization of your choosing.
Antidollars™
Frustrated that the only avenues for disagreement with an organization’s decisions or worldview are ineffective and inefficient protests, petitions, boycotts, and social media campaigns? Tired of cardboard protest signs wasting valuable economic resources, then being reduced to litter in the street? The Antidollar™ is for you. Patent-pending and only available through Deadweight Loss as a Service, each Antidollar™ donation either annihilates a dollar donated to your target or donates a dollar to its antithesis.
Here’s how it works: We’ve identified hundreds of pairs of organizations which directly oppose each other (e.g. Clean Air Task Force / American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, Electronic Frontier Foundation / Heat Initiative). For each pair, we’ve created a smart contract providing a “market” for this pair. Each market has a balance which starts at $0 and can become either negative or positive. Each January 1st at 00:00, the absolute value of the balance is donated to one of the organizations. If the balance is negative, it is donated to the first in the pair; if positive, it is donated to the second.
On our platform, you can send money (plus an OmniMatch™ subsidy) to a supported organization of your choosing. Behind the scenes, this works by increasing or decreasing the relevant market’s balance. If $1 is sent to the first organization, the balance decreases by a dollar; if the second, the balance increases by a dollar. The Antidollar™ does the exact opposite: sending an Antidollar™ to the first organization increases the balance by a dollar, and sending an Antidollar™ to the second decreases the balance by a dollar. If the balance currently favors the organization sent an Antidollar™, the Antidollar™ will simply subtract $1 from the amount donated; if not, the Antidollar™ is sent to the opposing organization, which, for well-chosen markets, should have a similar effect. Sending dollars or Antidollars™ on our platform is completely free.
OmniMatch™
If Antidollars™ aren’t motivation enough to use our platform, OmniMatch™ will be. $0.20 per Antidollar™ sold is directed towards an OmniMatch™ pool. This pool is used to match a fraction of each dollar or Antidollar™ directed towards an organization on our platform. Our proprietary OmniMatch™ algorithm determines this fraction using factors such as market activity. We guarantee these OmniMatch™ subsidies will never go below 10 cents per dollar. Funding organizations through our platform is a no-brainer: your donation will be worth 10%-50% more at no cost.
Thanks to OmniMatch™, in our closed beta lasting only a few months, several of our markets have already seen more than $10,000 in volume:
- Cato Institute / Democratic Socialists of America (current balance -$12)
- Brady Campaign / National Rifle Association (current balance +$536)
- Planned Parenthood Federation of America / National Right to Life Committee (current balance -$4165)
- United States Treasury / Democratic People’s Republic of Korea Central Planning Committee (current balance -$3484)
- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals / National Cattlemen’s Beef Association (current balance $6645)
- Biden for President / Donald J Trump for President (current balance -$8392)
Testimonials
Tired of political quarrels at the Thanksgiving table? Buy anti-gift cards for the whole family! Can’t make it to a (counter-)protest? Whether you’d have been at Planned Parenthood or on Wall Street, Deadweight Loss as a Service has got you covered. …. This startup … is … good.
— WIRED Magazine, “Forget Political Activism. ‘Deactivism’ Is Sweeping Silicon Valley”
[The] Hatch-Waxman [Act] was our wakeup call at Eli Lilly to start making connections inside the Beltway. They’ve been worth every penny, but were starting to impact our image. We partnered with Deadweight Loss as a Service to redirect our lobbying spend towards [Patients For Affordable Drugs Now] Antidollars™. It’s much more efficient, and our ESG scores have never been better.
— David A. Ricks, CEO of Eli Lilly and Company
Pro Mode™
Stay tuned for a future update to the platform, Pro Mode™. For power users, Pro Mode™ further increases liquidity on our markets using advanced AI technology. We embed the mission statements of thousands of humanitarian aid groups, religious organizations, PACs, and more into a high-dimensional “cause-space” which accurately represents divergence in goals between any two supported organizations. The Pro Mode™ smart contract unifies Antidollar™ markets, replacing many distinct prices with a single Praxis Vector™ within cause-space. At the end of the year, the Pro Mode™ contract allocates its funds proportionally to each charity’s cause-space distance from the final Praxis Vector™.
In Pro Mode™ with patent-pending Praxis Vector™ technology, every dollar pushes the market’s Praxis Vector™ towards your own personal EigenValues™, set manually or inferred with state-of-the-art LLMs. With Pro Mode™, you can be confident your funds increase the cosine similarity of the market’s Praxis Vector™ and your EigenValues™ as efficiently as possible, without wasting an Anticent™ on causes literally and figuratively orthogonal to your beliefs. And best of all, Pro Mode™ comes at no additional cost.1
What’s next
Our “PvP mode” experiment was extremely successful in closed alpha. We’ll go GA as soon as a lawyer stays long enough to sign off on it.
In the long term, you can expect even more from us. A certain seed investor has encouraged us to expand into the vote swapping market with the help of Dr. Bryan Caplan. Meanwhile, Dr. Robin Hanson has been instrumental in the design of the Jury Nullification Market Beta—early adopters can join the waitlist starting today!
We don’t expect to go public any time soon, but what’s a few unregistered securities between friends: invest in Deadweight Loss as a Service by sending Antidollars™ to our enemies.
Proceeds from Pro Mode™ Antidollars™ are used to compensate our shareholders and do not contribute to the OmniMatch pool.