AID:Tech

Market position

AID:Tech is described as an award-winning company and as the first to deliver international aid over blockchain; its CEO and co-founder Joseph Thompson was recognised by the UN as one of ten global SDG Pioneers for work promoting blockchain in global development. It has repeatedly appeared in Irish and European startup watchlists.

The company links payments and payouts directly to verified decentralised identity, enabling traceability of funds from donor or agency to individual recipient, and extends this into portable, cross-chain reputation that recipients and volunteers can carry between platforms.

Technology

The platform combines blockchain-based decentralised identifiers (DIDs) and NFTs with payments rails, KYC/AML verification, virtual cards and real-time payments, plus a Proof-of-Reputation protocol producing portable on-chain reputation scores. Public repositories cover Hyperledger Fabric on Kubernetes, the 'bryk' DID method reference implementation, did:algo on-chain storage smart contracts, a universal resolver fork, and a Circle API SDK, implemented largely in Go, TypeScript and JavaScript. The website also references AI in its payments infrastructure positioning.

Go-to-market

The company sells through partnerships and deployments with aid and relief organisations and ecosystem partners, including St. Vincent de Paul Disaster Services (Kare Platform disaster relief payouts), Circle (relief payouts delivered in USDC), the Irish Red Cross (TraceDonate), and the Cardano ecosystem via EMURGO, Fibo and Yoroi Wallet.

Governments, NGOs, charities and aid organisations distributing funds and entitlements; corporates, sports organisations and universities with large volunteer bases; and underserved or displaced individuals receiving aid, welfare, remittances and relief payouts.

Geography

Headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, with offices in Singapore, Ireland and the United States, and a fully remote, globally distributed team. Early aid delivery work was carried out with Syrian refugees in Lebanon.

History

The company is credited with being the first to deliver international aid using blockchain, described as a delivery to Syrian refugees in Lebanon. In 2018 it partnered with the Irish Red Cross on TraceDonate, an app allowing donors to see and track how their donations are spent. In August 2022 EMURGO Ventures, the venture arm of Cardano's commercial arm EMURGO, announced an investment to support expansion of AID:Tech's Web3 products, including a Volunteer-And-Earn wallet accessible to the Cardano community, with certified NFTs issued on the Cardano NFT marketplace Fibo and Yoroi Wallet integrating as an on-ramp. The company's open-source work has included Hyperledger Fabric deployment tooling for Kubernetes, a reference implementation of the 'bryk' DID method, on-chain storage for the did:algo method, and a Circle API SDK.

Risks & controversies

Public sources give inconsistent founding dates for the company (2014, 2015 and 2016), and the traction figures published on its About page are self-reported and not independently verified. The About page also carries unreplaced placeholder testimonial text.