The Clean Water Coin Initiative is the first ever coin designed and developed to be a nonprofit organization. What does that mean? We are a registered Nonprofit Organization and we’ve created a Crypto Charity and coin that lets a community actively participate in helping provide clean water. To do that we've teamed up with CharityWater.org so that we can create campaigns and raise funds for clean water projects. Also, the community can easily track exactly how we are doing by visiting our campaign page.
Cointelegraph.com sat down with the founder of Clean Water Coin, Zach Mettra, to discuss his view and motivation behind the launch of the Clean Water Coin initiative.
Cointelegraph: First, how was the idea of the Clean Water Coin created?
Zach Mettra: This is actually a two-part answer. I've had a few friends that have gone off to serve LDS missions who come back and talk about how clean water is considered a luxury in some of the places they went. Being from Orange County, CA -- I never fully realized that there were people on earth without access to clean water. Of course, it was in the realm of possibility but I was certainly guilty of living in the bubble of naivety. Fast forward a few years and I now have the fortunate opportunity of running a successful agency specializing in website management, mobile apps, and online marketing. I was introduced to the whole Cryptoworld last year, which is when I got help setting up my first rig (~3mhs). As I continued to monitor launch after launch, I realized that I had access to resources that most coins typically don't have or need to shell out money for. And so earlier this year, we got together to brainstorm ideas on what we could do differently to bring in some fresh ideas into the altcoin community. And so we decided to build a coin that is focused on helping bring clean water to the nearly 1 billion people on earth without access to it. Within our own team, we had been scammed out of about .75BTC over the last few months. Therefore, we wanted to go all out to show the community that this was a minor setback and that we were for real. We built a special site, financed the necessary media coverage (see: links below), and successfully registered as a Non-Profit Organization in hopes of demonstrating the community our legitimacy in an effort to set us apart from the downward spiral of quality and lack of vision with a lot of these new coins. So last month, as we were wrapping up the site, we got word that our NPO was almost finished, so we decided that it would be icing on the cake to announce our new coin on World Water Day (last Saturday).
CT: There is an almost innumerable amount of alt.coins at this moment so what makes your coin different from the rest?
ZM: I went into a lot of detail above but I believe there are three major differences setting us apart from a lot of other coins: infrastructure, a clear vision, and a tenacity to see it through regardless of what happens.
CT: And what are your plans for Clean Water Coin? Specifically, what is the long-term goal of this project?
ZM: Ideally at some point if/when we are able to grow this community to where we want, we would love to get our hands dirty by encouraging our staff to go out and provide direct relief to these families rather than just donating money to yet another charity who already has that infrastructure in place. But for now, we are focusing on how to facilitate the first ever stress-free launch (more info on our ANN), while continuing to be open, honest, transparent, and active in the altcoin community. After the launch, we will be reaching out to other companies to see if we can bring them on board as our official sponsors and continue raising the value of WATER.
CT: How is the Clean Water Coin related to Bitcoin? Does it have any significant differences/advantages?
ZM: It is similar in the sense that it is a cryptocurrency, but for the foreseeable future, it will likely just be traded against BTC. That being said, another vision we have involves working with small businesses, helping them get started by accepting BTC as a form of payment.
The first one was www.slidebelts.com who will be donating $1 for every belt sold with the promocode: WATER.
The more people we get used to the idea of accepting crypto-currency, the better!!