Back a project, and keep your money safe until it is real

What backing means

Backing is saying yes to a project so it gets made. You pledge an amount toward a creator's goal, and if enough people do the same by the deadline, the creator gets the money and builds the thing, and you receive whatever they promised for your pledge: the product, early access, a name on the wall, whatever the campaign describes. That is reward crowdfunding, and it is the only kind here.

It is not investing. You are not buying shares, lending money, or acquiring any right to a share of what the project earns later. If the project becomes enormously valuable, you have the reward you were promised and nothing else. If it fails after being funded, you have whatever recourse the law gives you against the creator, and the page below is honest about that limit.

What makes it different from the usual crowdfunding page is where your pledge sits while you wait, which is the next section.

Where your pledge sits, and how it comes back

When you back a campaign, the pledge does not go to the creator and it does not go to us. It goes into an escrow held by a program on a public network: an account with an address and a balance that anyone, including you, can look up. The program has exactly two ways to let money out. If the campaign reaches its goal by its deadline, the creator can claim it. If the deadline passes with the goal unmet, every backer can take their own pledge back.

That refund is not a support ticket and not a decision somebody makes. It is a path in the contract that opens on its own the moment the goal is missed, and you take your pledge back with one tap and no form. Nobody at CoFunders can move the money either way, which is also why us going out of business could not strand it.

One honest detail: the platform fee and any tip you chose to add are taken at the moment you pledge and are not part of the refund. What comes back is the pledge itself, in full.

What a campaign is

• A goal and a deadline, both on the page and both enforced by the contract rather than by us.
• A minimum pledge of $10, which is the smallest amount the contract accepts.
• Reward tiers: several levels of pledge, each stating what you get for it. Read the one you are backing, because it is the creator's promise to you.
• A story, a cover image, comments from other backers, and a direct line to the creator by message.
• A share rate on the card, from nothing up to the ceiling, which is what the creator pays whoever brings them a backer. It is the same rate you can earn by sharing, below.
• A currency: each campaign collects in USDC or EURC, a stablecoin designed to stay at one dollar or one euro. You see amounts in your own currency.

Every campaign here is a reward campaign. Backing does not pay a financial return, and a campaign that offered one would not be allowed on the platform as it stands.

Earning while you back, or without backing at all

You are never required to back anything. Browsing is free, and four things pay on their own terms, each at a rate the contract or the network sets rather than one we invented.

• Share a campaign. Every campaign can pay the person who brings it a backer, at a rate the creator chose, from nothing up to 18.5% of each pledge. Copy the link from the campaign, send it to one person, and when they back through it the contract pays you inside the pledge itself. One friend backing $100 on a campaign paying 10% is $10 in your wallet.
• Invite a friend. Your account has a referral code. Someone who signs up with it and backs projects pays you 0.75% of each of their pledges, which is half of our fee, for as long as they keep backing. On top of that, 10% of the fee revenue they generate comes back to you, and $20 more every time one of them generates another $50.
• Stake your SOL. Money you hold as SOL can be staked and earns the Solana network's own reward, about 5% a year. We do not pay it and cannot stop it, and you keep both stake authorities. The reward is the steady part; the price of SOL is not, and it can fall sharply.
• Finish the onboarding. Six steps, plus ten people you invited who each launch and back a campaign, pay $50 once, after a person has reviewed the claim. It can be refused for any reason.

None of this is income you can plan on. Each one is a rate on things other people decide to do, and nobody, including us, can tell you how much that adds up to. The referral page lists every rate and what it depends on.

Fees and the holding cost, plainly

Backing costs you nothing on top of your pledge, and taking your money out costs nothing at all. The one charge that is yours is the holding cost on a balance you leave idle, and it is small enough to state in a sentence.

The holding cost in numbers: a balance of $100 left untouched for a whole year accrues $0.52. It applies to money doing nothing, not to a pledge, which sits in a campaign's escrow and not in your account. What accrues is shown on the Payments screen, and you settle it there or with your next movement, or leave it as a figure on a screen. It is never taken without your tap.

The feed, and Discover

The feed is one campaign at a time, full screen: a cover, a line about what the money buys, how far along it is, and one button. Swipe to the next, tap to back, about thirty seconds a project. It is built around your own country, so someone in Portugal sees Portuguese campaigns in Portuguese, from people they could meet. A project down the road is easier to judge and easier to receive a reward from than one on another continent.

Discover is for arriving with a question: a search box and a grid, ordered by boosts first, then spotlight, then plan, then how recent a campaign is. Both are open without an account, and neither asks you to back anything to keep looking.

The app runs in your browser and installs to your home screen from there, on iPhone and Android, with no app store and nothing to pay. Once installed it opens full screen like any other app and keeps you signed in.

Staying safe

It is worth being exact about what the escrow protects, because two different risks get confused. The first is custody: could the money disappear between your tap and the project starting? Here that risk is handled by structure rather than trust. Your pledge sits in a program-owned account with a public balance, nobody can draw it early, and it comes back to you on its own if the goal is missed.

The second is delivery, and the escrow does not cover it. Once a campaign reaches its goal, the money goes to the creator and cannot be returned. The creator may be late, may ship something worse than described, or may fail entirely, usually because building things is hard rather than because anyone lied. That is the risk you take when you back a funded campaign, and it is real. Back what you can afford to part with.

We do not verify that a project is what it says it is, and we say so on the transparency page. What reduces the risk is what you can check before backing. Has this person made anything before? Is the goal proportionate to what they are promising? Does the page say what the money buys, in what order, by when, and what happens if a supplier is late? Genuine plans have numbers that can turn out wrong; the vague ones stay vague because detail is checkable.

• Read the reward tier you are backing. It is the creator's promise, and it is what you can hold them to.
• Ask in the comments or by message. A creator who answers specifically is a good sign; one who does not is information too.
• Use the report button on a campaign that looks wrong. Reports are read by a person.
• Nobody legitimate ever asks for your recovery phrase or your password: not support, not a moderator, not a verification step. Every such request is a theft in progress.
• Every payment leaves your account only with your own tap on your own device. There is no standing authority and nothing that can be taken while you are not looking.
• Rewards paid by us, such as the onboarding reward, are reviewed by a person before anything is sent.

Taking money out

Your balance is yours at every moment. Money you have not pledged, and money that has come back to you from a campaign that missed its goal, leaves whenever you say so, with no lock-in, no platform fee, no minimum and no waiting. The only money that cannot come back is a pledge to a campaign that already reached its goal, because that money is with the creator building the thing.

There are two ways out. You can send your stablecoin straight to any address you name, which costs the network's own fee of fractions of a cent. Or you can sell it for euros to a card or a bank account through MoonPay, a licensed provider that runs the step inside its own screen, verifies you, and sets its own fee there before you confirm. We hand the money to the address it names and take nothing.

Money in works the same way in reverse: pay by card in the app, or send a stablecoin straight to your account. You do not need to know anything about crypto to do either; you sign up with an email, pay by card, and see your own currency.

Start

Open the feed and look. There is nothing to pay and nothing to back until you find something you want to see exist.

Browse the campaigns · Every way you can earn · What a creator sees.