The Artizen mission
Our mission is to unlock human creativity by reinventing how we fund art, science, technology, and design. Join us to celebrate and support the people, projects, and causes that make a positive impact in the world.
Reinvent funding for human creativity
Human creativity is core to civilization, and yet we chronically underfund it. Artists, scientists, and builders of every kind are essential for thriving communities and a sustainable planet.
So why do we struggle to fund the people upon which we depend?
The problem is not in our values, and it's not for lack of resources. It's that we've lost trust in our institutions to use our money wisely.
Artizen aims to restore that trust by eliminating bureaucracy and putting power back in the hands of communities. We do it with a transparent and participatory funding model that lets people directly support their values.
Funding is broken for creators
The truth is, funding is broken. To start with, it's biased. The vast majority of funding goes to just the top 1% of creators. It's also highly bureaucratic. That means waste, with roughly half of funding spent on administrative bloat. Finally, it's painfully complex for artists, scientists, donors, grantmakers, and everyone involved.
Governments and charities spend billions on art, science, and human creativity, but weโre excluded from the decision-making process and disconnected from the work we fund. We feel like our donations are checks mailed into the void rather than investments in the world we want to build.
We don't trust that governments and charities will use our money wisely because bureaucracies are notoriously wasteful.
We don't trust that our money will end up where we want it to go because we're excluded from the decision-making process.
And we don't trust that we will benefit from our contributions because we have no ownership stake in the work we fund.
New way to fund human creativity
To rebuild trust, we need a new funding model that is efficient and transparent. It needs to be voluntary, scalable, and easy to use for communities of all sizes and interests. It needs to empower its members by including them in the decision-making process. And it needs to amplify projects that provide the most good to the most people. These are our objectives for designing the Artizen Prize.
We make it easy for our community to:
Pool Our Money
Donations to Artizen are pooled and awarded to new projects selected by our community. And because crypto enables borderless, trustless transactions, anyone around the world can easily contribute.
Curate the Winning Projects
Winning projects are selected by our community. The goal is to carefully balance power between trusted leaders and the public, ensure winning projects uphold our curation guidelines, and champion quality projects from unknown talent, avoiding the trap of becoming a popularity contest.
Earn Artifacts and Rewards
With the traditional system, communities have no ownership stake in the work they fund. But at Artizen we're changing this by rewarding donors with Artifacts that deliver real value to their owners. This creates an added incentive to donate and provides the missing sense of ownership.
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Support the visionaries and problem-solvers
At Artizen, we believe people want to support art, science, and human creativity, especially as the risks of neglecting these endeavors become more apparent every day. From the perils of ecological collapse to the erosion of local cultures, we're all anxious about losing something important to us.
By aligning projects and resources with real needs in the world, Artizen unlocks new money, untapped network effects, and sustainable support for the visionaries and problem-solvers who are building the world we want.
Together we'll transform how the world funds human creativity.