Telos (www.telos.net), one of the most active blockchain platforms in the world according to Blocktivity, today announced that it is partnering with social impact startup All_EBT to bring its digital public assistance solution to the Telos blockchain. The Telos blockchain will help All_EBT with facilitating payments across all shareholders in food assistance and public welfare, creating a vital bridge between public food assistance programs and private fulfillment innovation.
All_EBT is a virtual food stamp card that has helped 10,000 low-income people use EBT for online grocery orders and deliveries. Telos will help All_EBT scale this vital service to millions of Americans making it easier to facilitate payments between public assistance programs and digital food couriers like Doordash and Instacart. The Telos blockchain will be used to create an immutable record of EBT data, which will make it verifiable, auditable, and trackable for users, merchants, and the government. This will improve trust in the system while lowering costs and preventing fraud.
“Other than inertia, there has been an unwillingness of public entities to move food assistance programs to digital because they have not developed an easy way to do things like verifying recipients, verifying purchase eligibility, and preventing fraud and other abuse. Blockchain can help fill in all of those gaps,” said Suvi Rinkinen, CEO of the Telos Foundation. “The inability of those most in need of food to apply assistance toward safer options right now like online delivery is only deepening the social divide, weakening society’s safety net, and creating unnecessary health risk.”
“In America alone, more than 22% of the population, 54 million people, live on food stamps. That number has gone up over the last several weeks and months amid the COVID-19 pandemic, making it even harder for people on food stamps to access healthy food and financial services. Families, women, children, and our hardest workers are struggling to put food on the table,” said ALL_EBT Founder and CEO Eli Calderón Morin. We believe that technology should help solve everyday problems for under-served communities first. Now even more so, All_EBT is helping families access basic financial services and healthy food through its online shopping platform for food stamps so that they can stay safe.”
All EBT was winner of the Social Impact Award at EOSIO Hackathon and a winner at hackathons organized by Facebook and Y Combinator. Public assistance is just the latest area to utilize Telos’ blockchain for payments, joining other sectors like medicine, gaming, and entertainment.
ABOUT ALL_EBT
ALL_EBT is a virtual card that allows people on food stamps to use their benefits online for services like DoorDash, Instacart and other apps. ALL_EBT also provides a consumer on-ramp for crypto adoption and financial services, empowering underbanked and low-income communities with access to financial services that are a basic human right. ALL_EBT has also been a winner of the social impact award at the EOSIO Hackathon, and has won hackathons organized by Facebook and Y Combinator. For more information, please visit https://republic.co/all_ebt.
ABOUT TELOS
Telos is a high-capacity network and the second most active blockchain platform in the world according to Blocktivity. Telos features a robust, third-generation blockchain governance system including advanced voting features and smart contracts that can be fully configured to meet the needs of any developer. Created by developers for developers, Telos extends its state-of-the-art blockchain and governance features to all DApps on its platform, delivering the best user experience in the marketplace. Telos also supports the blockchain ecosystem by serving as an incubator and accelerator for decentralized applications. For more information, please visit www.telos.net.
