Invest Your STEEM and SBD in Solar
In this post I want to tell you about my investment side-project and show how you can be a part of it, by investing your hard-earned STEEM and SBD.
About three years ago, frustrated by barriers between people interested to invest a small share of their savings in solar energy projects and the actual practical opportunities to do so in a streamlined and low-risk way, I started my own “crowd-saving” or “crowd-investment” (as opposed to crowdfunding) platform in Sweden.
The idea is simple: people open interest-free saving accounts with Sparasol and deposit any amount of funds (so far we've seen deposit from varying from $10 to $1,000). Sparasol invest this money on their behalf through one of our partner platforms (such as Kiva.org, SunFunder.com and joinTRINE.com in one of small-scale community-owned solar energy project somewhere in East Africa or South America. My other company, Wake-Up Call, matches the investment by putting the same amount (taken from the company profits) into the very same project, so the effect is doubled. People can withdraw their money – the entire amount or any part of it – at any moment, for any reason. Within two banking days they have their money transferred to their account. We have had zero issues or complaints in those three years.
It’s a modest side-project of mine that only requires a few hours of my attention a month. One could say it is one of my hobbies – because I want to support decentralised renewable energy infrastructure that empowers people to raise themselves out of extreme poverty. Still, in these past three years Sparasol has helped to fund four projects in Kenya, Uganda, Nicaragua and Zambia by raising USD $4,000 in interest-free funding. I wouldn’t have been able to leverage this amount of funding by my own efforts, as a private individual. The power of a crowd is awesome!
So far we have only been accepting Swedish kronor via a bank transfer for people wishing to save with Sparasol. However, ever since I discovered Steem, I have been wondering if Sparasol could leverage its potential – both it terms of its awesome community and it terms of its two cryptocurrencies. Finally, after some thinking and planning, I am happy to announce that Sparasol will be now accepting STEEM and SBD on its platform.
HOW TO INVEST?
It’s very easy. Transfer any amount of STEEM or SBD to oleg326756 (it’s my Steemit account) with a memo:
SparasolI will add your account name and the amount you invested to the Sparasol ledger I am keeping. Once we have a project eligible for funding, and a minimum required amount for investing, I will put your STEEM and SBD to work (once I have exchanged it for its US Dollars or Euro). As always, Wake-Up Call will match your investment from its own capital (and partly from my personal reserves of STEEM and SBD), effectively doubling the impact of your investment. And, just like with our non-Steem customer, you can withdraw back your STEEM and SBD upon first notice. Simply send me an email to [email protected]
ANY QUESTIONS?
Sparasol’s website is only available in Swedish at the moment, for which I apologise. But the entire procedure described above is really all you need to know in order to start saving with Sparasol. If you have any questions left, you are very welcome to ask them in the comments sections below.
Let’s make it happen! You, me, and STEEM together!
Two questions:
Thanks! And yay for solar!
Thank you for your questions, @improv!
It is still available and going strong.
Usually when Sparasol’s members make a deposit their $, € or SEK, we calculate their value of their investment in Swedish crowns (SEK) and they get repaid the same amount of SEK, when they make a withdrawal. I thought we would do the same thing with contributions in STEEM and SBD, pegging them to SEK as a stable-value currency. So yes, if the price of SBD happens to double in a year’s time, then you will get back the amount of SEK that would only be enough to buy half the original amount of SBD you invested.
If this doesn’t seem like an attractive proposition to you, I could offer another option: to make investment in STEEM (I deem SBD too volatile to take this risk), then I will invest its current value into solar on your behalf (with a matching amount invested by Wake-Up Call) and then in the future you can withdraw the original amount of STEEM that you invested. Does this sound like a better deal to you, @improv?
Cheers and have a sunny day! ;)
No, I'd be happy to have it pegged to SEK. Honestly, I expect SBD to tumble between now and then. I expect it to someday return to a peg at $1, as it was intended.
I just sent 10 SBD for this. Coinmarketcap tells me it's USD3.61/SBD right now, and google tells me the $36.10 is 312.66SEK. Sound right?
Yep, correct. I checked the coinmarketcap in SEK and it gave me SEK 311.6 per 10 SBD. Let’s round it up to SEK 312. It’s almost exactly EUR 30, so I’ll invest EUR 60, doubling your investment. And whenever you want to withdraw your investment, just send me a comment (or, even better, an email on [email protected] ) and I’ll send you the equivalent of SEK 312 in SBD. Does this sound good to you?
Sounds great!
…aaaand done!!
Each of us have just helped one person in Kenya – who most likely is a farmer, a teacher or a small business owner earning more than $2 per day – to get solar electricity and avoid a total of 484 kg of CO2-emissions from being released into the atmosphere each year.
https://www.jointrine.com/just-invested/30628
YAY! This makes me glad!
Me too!! Thank you for making this happen!!! <3
Glad to do it! I hope this comes to the U.S. soon. I found some similar projects here, but they only allow investments by folks who make $200k+/year, which just seems unfair. I know I can afford to lose $1000. Our system for establishing trust is based on a false premise.
I think that TRINE is available to the US citizens and residents already (not just the institutional investors). Is it not? I could check with their team, if you like.
The link says there's an expected 6% return. Do we split that if it works out, or is that your fee for services rendered?
Yeah, that is the cost I take for:
hosting and maintaining Sparasol’s website,
covering the risk: even if the project defaults on the loan and the investment is lost, you can still withdraw your full investment, at any time and at zero risk to you as a lender. Sparasol has to wait until the project has fully repaid the loan – you don’t. That is the unique selling point that Sparasol adds to this model, eliminating risk on one hand, but also removing the profit motive for our members. Another USP is that we put the same amount of money into the same project as our members, getting our skin in the game same as they are.
Of course, if you would like to benefit from the interest-generating lending that TRINE offers, I would absolutely encourage you to do so and invest with them! I know the founders and a few of the team members. I met them in person a few times couple of years ago, when they were just starting. An awesome group of driven-by-ideals and highly professional young people.
I do want to, but I got to a screen that let me know that I can't unless I'm in the EU. And I'm in the USA.
Oh, okay, got you! I’ll ask the people at TRINE about their expansion plans for outside of the EU next time I talk to them.
What you got available in the US is Kiva.org’s loans focused on spreading solar energy. You don’t earn any interest on those, but they are perfect for small investors (or, rather, savers). A share of Sparasol’s investments goes into funding loans on Kiva.org too.
Enjoyable post Interesting to see I'm not the only one that is thinking about this. The coin market will be turbulent for the upcoming year(s) but I really believe in it. We do need to look better at the insights of every coin. What team is behind it, is there any management. How strong is the product, is there any product at all? I found this amazing platform: https://www.coincheckup.com An amazing crypto research site. They researched every single crypto out there. This is truly great.