Our team, rooted in South Africa and Nigeria, is deeply committed to addressing the challenges faced by our communities. We are participating in Based Africa to deliver homegrown solutions that directly respond to the lived experiences of people in our region, where poverty and limited access to economic opportunities are prevalent. Our app aims to combat extreme poverty by providing a Personalized Universal Basic Income tailored to each individual’s socioeconomic status, empowering them to improve their quality of life.

We are tackling the challenge of extreme poverty by providing access to a regular grant through a Personalized Universal Basic Income. This income is tailored to each individual’s socioeconomic status score, ensuring they can meet their most basic human needs. By leveraging BASE, we aim to empower our community with the gas free financial stability necessary to improve their quality of life.

Our Ribbon App empowers users by allowing them to earn crypto tokens through responding to socioeconomic questionnaires. These questionnaires help calculate their Socioeconomic Status Score, uncovering their basic needs. Based on this score and the Consumer Price Index of their country, we quantify the amount of Universal Basic Income (UBI) they qualify for, ensuring they can meet their essential needs.

The potential impact of our project is profound. By providing a Personalized Universal Basic Income, we aim to alleviate extreme poverty and improve the quality of life for individuals in underserved communities. Additionally, the Ribbon Protocol platform enables any organization such as Worldcoin, Coinbase, Circle, BASE etc to easily create UBI Programs and distribute Universal Basic Income rewards via the platform, extending the reach and benefits of our solution. This collaborative approach not only addresses immediate financial needs but also fosters long-term economic stability and empowerment, and onboards the next Billion people onto BASE.

We encountered two challenges during our project:
Transaction History Extraction: Initially, we struggled with extracting transaction history from the wallet. We reached out to Will Binns (Senior Developer Advocate, BASE) during the Daily Office Hours mentorship sessions, who provided us with links to code for ‘list transactions’ and ‘webhooks’ to pull the transaction history. This assistance was crucial in resolving our issue.

Base Name Service on Testnet: We faced difficulties using the Base Name Service on the testnet for the Smart Wallet, as it is only available on the mainnet. While we managed to get assistance and use Base Names on Testnet using the Coinbase Developer Platform MPC AI Wallets, we considered an approach where users send the Base Name NFT to the Smart Wallet. However, this process seemed overly complex for a testnet environment and too technical for our target audience of low-income users.

We suggest that the Coinbase and BASE teams consider providing a way to perform Base Name Registration on the testnet for Smart Wallets to facilitate easier testing and user adoption.

***Update: A follow up call on Coinbase Daily Office Hours uncovered another solution: Will suggested that we apply for Base Gasless Campaign which will sponsor mainnet Gas Fees to enable our Beta Test users to create Base Names on mainnet