Planting A Tree Online To Green Desert

How and where would you dispense $10,000; $100,000; $1,000,000: $10,000,000 to have maximum impact? This is a hard question. What is maximum impact you want to get by spending money? To get more money, have a good social impact, or solve a social problem? But when I open my phone and click an app which most Chinese people used several times every day. I think I find the answer. That is, combine public's power and fun together to do something different.

It’s a little game inside Alipay — Ants Forest. Alipay is the biggest mobile payment app in China. In the fourth quarter of 2016, Alipay had a 54% share of China's US$5.5 trillion mobile payment market. Ants Forest is a public benefit game which based on personal “carbon account”. Users get "emergy" to planting trees by walking, use online payment, buy traffic ticket, paying water and electricity bills, etc. When you get enough energies, Ant Forest will plant a real tree in the desert. Now, there may have 200 million people playing this little game.