there's $130,000 in Gratipay that needs to go

[chadwhitacre]

Hey @adamstac @jerodsanto et al.! :-)

May I ping you about two recent developments on the Gratipay (née Gittip) front? I think they may be of interest to you and your {listen,read}ership. :-)

Team Applications are Open

As you may know, we went through an event last spring called the Gratipocalypse: we went out of business, because of legal concerns that came to light when Balanced started going out of business. We quickly bounced back with a relaunch as Gratipay 2.0—linked in the May 23 weekly, thank you! 🙇—and we've been hard at work since then cleaning up after all the disruption of the relaunch. You can clearly see the full stop and the relaunch around "Teams" on our stats page:

Anyway, we've now got gratipay.com back to a semi-respectable state and we're accepting new Team applications, so that's ping item number one! :-)

$130,000

Ping item number two is that we have $130,000 left over in escrow from Gratipay 1.0, and if people don't apply to withdraw it before October 1, we're going to attempt to refund it back to all of the people it originally came from. There's pressure on us because the Balanced refund API goes dark on October 9 and we need to refund the money before then if we're ever going to refund it. We've got a post up with the details.

We only have email addresses for 320 (17%) out of the 1,924 users who have a Gratipay 1.0 balance to withdraw, and we'd really like to pay out as much of that $130,000 as possible in the next few weeks before we have to refund it. Can you help us spread the word that people should check if they have a Gratipay 1.0 balance to withdraw?

Thanks for any help you can lend! :-)