Proof of Giving
By: Takens Theorem
Tags: Giving, Charity, Ethereum, Donations, Cryptocurrency

For many, the term “crypto” summons visions of lambos and 6-figure cartoon cats. Crypto’s cultural mores involve going to the moon, and “number go up.” Despite these associations, a theme in 2021 has been charitable giving. With incredible gains for those who’ve held cryptocurrency for a long time, there has also been a wave of charity.

The above network illustrates giving just on Ethereum starting in 2021, and only for a dozen known addresses for charitable activities. Dots are wallets and lines are donations of crypto to these charities. Because these addresses are public, the blockchain serves as “proof of giving.” The width of the lines reflects approximate donation in USD. You can see that some wallets (or exchanges) flowed into several charities, and sometimes many times into the same charity.

All together, in May 2021 prices, this network maps almost $1,000,000,000 in giving. This large figure is mostly attributable to the famously large donation to the India Covid Crypto Relief Fund. In the network diagram above, this donation appears as the massive thick line into that charity.

The largest donation was in meme coins.

But even without this largest donation, there is over $100,000,000 in giving, just on Ethereum, and just in these few wallets. Here are some examples of charitable activities in the crypto space in 2021, challenging stereotypes and having positive impacts for many less fortunate. Below is a quick summary of just some of this giving, with links to public addresses.

Examples

Cobie’s stream. “Cobie fun” is just one wallet from a prominent twitch.tv stream. On this live video stream, the prominent member of the crypto community Cobie sometimes jumps into twitch channels and with his followers gives to various musicians, artists and others. The network shows only one such wallet, one that gained significant attention: Cobie and his community helped a family who were in medical debt because their youngster had just battled with cancer (and won).

Maximum-impact charities. GiveDirectly and GiveWell have been taking crypto donations for some time. These programs use scientific research to determine what charitable activities have the greatest per-dollar impact on human well-being, especially among underserved communities. Their programs often focus on health, such as disease prevention, surgery, and more. One recent donation to GiveDirectly included millions from the co-founder of Ethereum. Both are 501(c)(3) charities that take ether and other cryptocurrencies.

Vitalik inspired by giving much.

India Covid Crypto Relief. The co-founder of Polygon took to Twitter to summon the community to help with the unrelenting COVID-19 surge that spread around India in the spring. He and others founded the “India Covid Crypto Relief” contract on Ethereum which quickly received thousands of donations, including one from the founder of Ethereum which, in May’s prices, amounted hundreds of millions alone.

Birth of India Covid Crypto Relief

Giving through NFTs. Some of these donations came from OpenSea and Artblocks.io platforms, which allows NFT creators to send some of the proceeds of their sales automatically and directly to the charity. On OpenSea, for example, creators just have to set a royalty payout recipient to the public address of the charity. Once configured in this way, the project gives automatically and without any intermediary. This can be done on contract too. For example, Dan at OpenSea configured the payout address from the minting fee of the Colorglyphs NFT project (0.05 ETH) to go straight to the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Another charitable NFT project mediated via OpenSea.

Diverse giving opportunities. An assortment of other 501(c)(3) charities have public addresses: SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) and Methuselah are both charities related to slowing the effects of aging through science and technology; EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) defends civil liberties in the digital world; Heifer works in local communities around the world to help fight hunger and poverty; Rainforest Foundation US works with indigenous communities to help them protect and oversee their land; Wild Tomorrow is a charity that works with local communities to help maintain and protect endangered animal populations. 350.org is a 501(c)(3) non-profit that works to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and expand research and accessibility to renewables.

Approximate estimate of giving in 2021 based on late May values.

Conclusion

A use case for crypto seems obvious here. For example, in the case with NFTs, platforms like OpenSea permit creators to directly and automatically donate to charities without any intermediary and without the need for any specialty infrastructure to accomplish this — it is direct on the public blockchain, accessible and visible to all as a “proof of giving.” Moreover, giving anonymously is much easier, and can be done directly without sharing personal details (and without the collateral damage of mailers and emails). There has been recognition of these positives among major industry players. (Important note: If you plan to declare the giving on your taxes, most of these charities permit you to share your personal information to get an official receipt for that purpose.)

This blog post is based just on Ethereum, and with only about a dozen public addresses. There are others on Ethereum not included here. For example, Cryptotrunks is a successful NFT project that works with Offsetra to offset on-chain activity and support renewable energy projects. There are also many charitable and non-profit activities among Gitcoin’s projects, such as Giveth.io, which is poised to expand this trend. When charitable giving with Bitcoin is included, this would likely be a much higher figure. And because many addresses to charities are obfuscated by charity services for reasons of privacy, this figure is likely larger again.

Crypto has way more kindness than it gets credit for.