Charities Put a Bitcoin Twist on Giving Tuesday

Don’t just Hodl bitcoin this year, donate it.

Charities are leaning into the blockchain space this year with #BitcoinTuesday, a sideways take on the philanthropy movement following Thanksgiving, Black Friday and Cybermonday (Dec 3).

Drawing inspiration from one crypto’s more heartwarming stories, the Pineapple Fund – wherein a pseudonymous bitcoiner donated some $55 million towards 60 charities during the 2017 bull market – options for crypto-based donations abound.

“The fact that there were talking about an open-source distributed, user-created project that doesn't have central ownership seems like a perfect product market matc†h,” said Woodrow Rosenbaum, GivingTuesday’s Data & Insights Lead in a phone.

Launched in 2012 by 92nd Street Y and the United Nations Foundation, GivingTuesday received early attention from Mashable, Facebook and Microsoft and raised some $400 million in the U.S. last year, according to the GivingTuesday foundation.

The Giving Block, a for profit firm founded in 2018, is spearheading this year’s rendition of crypto Giving Tuesday with #BitcoinTuesday.

Rounding up support from Gemini and Brave Browser, among others, the technology company is orchestrating aid for nonprofits such as No Kid Hungry, the Tor Project and Pencils of Promise.

The D.C.-based group is leaning on crypto’s favorable tax status. As with stock donations, donors need pay no capital gains on what they give.

“In times of crisis, to reach those lofty ambitions, we need to be friendly not only to traditional financing mechanisms, but to the crypto community who's been very innovative,” said Ettore Rossetti, global digital lead of Save the Children in a phone interview.

Founded in 1919, Save the Children has accepted crypto donations since 2013. “We feel like children will win if we can unlock new forms of funding,” he said.

You can also give through BitGive, one of the oldest crypto-specific non-profits in the field.

Founded in 2013, BitGive uses bitcoin’s blockchain and works with smart contract provider RSK. Its GiveTrack project follows donated money, showing who it benefits. The charity collects less than one percent in fees for processing transactions, according to its website.

“It's a way to be transparent,” said BitGive founder Connie Gallipi in a phone interview. “It says this project was created on this day in this time, this NGO was added on this day in this time and we checked the bitcoin rate on this day at this time,” she said.

BitGive currently sponsors personally vetted NGOs across the globe, including three projects in Venezuela focusing on orphanages, hospitals, and abandoned animals.

CryptoGivingTuesday, a community coalition spun out of the GivingTuesday organization, is another destination for donations.

Through its service, donations can be made in multiple cryptos to NGOs and non-profits including bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), litecoin (LTC), dash (DASH), the lightning network, binance coin (BNB), bitcoin cash (BCH) and XRP.

GivingTuesday takes a decentralized approach to its campaigns. Communities often adopt GivingTuesday’s branding to promote a campaign in their niche, Rosenbaum said.

“Some of these big payment processor platforms like Facebook and PayPal use GivingTuesday as a great way for them to engage [with their audience],” he said. “So we'll give people best practices. We want to hear how their campaigns went, learn about their results and bring them into that network.”

UPDATE (Nov 27, 16:10 UTC): A prior version of this story said the Giving Block is a nonprofit. It is a technology firm working with nonprofits.