Using crypto to help 450 homeless people!

Warm Up Campaign #3 — Transparency Report

For the third year in a row, members of BlockchainBH have shown that the uses of cryptocurrency go way beyond investment.

Starting in 2017, we have run a yearly campaign to help the homeless using cryptocurrency. Why? In short, it’s just cheaper, easier and more transparent than any other global fundraising mechanism. But don’t take our word for it, let’s jump straight into the campaign stats to show you what we mean.

Key Numbers

BlockchainBH founder Yakko Majuri with the 120 blankets purchased during the first round of the campaign

Total amount raised: 3,846.98 BRL

Blankets delivered: 120

Meals delivered: 331

Homeless people helped: 451

Breakdown

The team responsible for the delivery of blankets in central Belo Horizonte. The three cars were driving for hours during the night to multiple spots in order to deliver the blankets to those who need it most.

We made two conversions from crypto into FIAT. For the first one, we converted 0.05234964 BTC into 2,176.28 BRL on 15/07/2019, and for the second, we converted 0.03616491 BTC into 1,670.70 BRL on 09/08/2019. Those conversions incurred standard network transaction fees for sending the funds to the exchange, but we did not pay any exchange fees on the conversion operations, as part of our partnership with BitcoinToYou, a supporter of the campaign.

For that total of 3,846.98 BRL, the money was spent as follows:

2,100.00 BRL for 120 blankets

1,657.38 BRL for 331 meals

89.60 BRL for covering the gas costs incurred by the four cars that took part in the two delivery sessions

Receipts attached at the end of the article

Analyzing the donations

The majority of our donations were made in BTC, with only around 3$ (at the time) being donated in ETH, LTC, and XLM combined. Thus, prior to the second conversion, we topped up the BTC address to account for those donations and made all of our crypto to FIAT conversions in BTC.

As for some stats about the donations, take a look below:

In total, we received 14 donations, having an average transaction fee of around 2.35% (weighted mean). And it’s that number that makes us extremely happy. In Brazil, accepting payments with debit and credit cards costs merchants around 2–4% in fees — within the country. Merchants also need to have the appropriate setup to accept these payments, which can lead to even higher costs.

In our case, our campaign was open to donors worldwide, with that 2.35% fee including transactions that were made from different countries, with different currencies, thousands of kilometers away. Those types of transactions, especially for small values like our average donations, can have fees of up to 10% on services like Western Union.

Why we chose crypto

A question we often get is why we only accept crypto for our Warm Up campaigns. There are three main reasons for this:

No bureaucracy: We ran a small-scale global non-profit campaign to help an important cause. Why should we have to bury ourselves in bureaucracy from the banks and governments to do it? It would cost more (meaning less impact) and take a greater effort from our end to make it work. To that, we say: thank you, but no thank you. Transparency: Want to audit our campaign? Please do! You don’t need any special skills to do it. Feel free to check through all the transactions on the block explorer of your choice. Our campaign addresses can be found on the campaign website here. From looking at these addresses, you can see that we received the exact amount we claimed to have received, and you can also check past crypto prices to see that the amount received matches the total amount spent. We kept none of it. Low-cost, global transactions: Anyone in the world can donate, and only 2.35% will be lost to fees on average. That’s significantly better than current alternatives for cross-border payments, or, in some cases, even payments in the same currency.

The delivery process

BlockchainBH founder Victor Silveira listening to one homeless man’s story about how he ended up in his situation.

Throughout the campaign, we opted for making two deliveries. The first one happened in July and the second one in August. The rationale for this was that we wanted to maximize impact, and having noticed that temperatures were reaching their lowest around mid-July, we realized we had to act fast. So we purchased 120 blankets and delivered them as soon as possible. Then, we used this first delivery to gather more traction for the campaign, receiving more donations which were used to buy meals on the second delivery.

Since the cold was starting to ease up, we then partnered with the local project Madrugada Sem Fome to sponsor the meals during one of their delivery nights. For over a decade the project has organized monthly deliveries of food, clothes, blankets, hygiene products and other supplies for the homeless population of Belo Horizonte. We paid for 331 meals, and Victor and I, the founders of BlockchainBH, were present on the day of the delivery. We went around town for three hours to help people from different areas of the city, and you can see videos of this here.

DVision Tech’s commitment to doubling donations

DVision Tech, one of our partners, made a commitment to double every donation up to a limit of 2,000 BRL. They fulfilled their commitment, and you can find their donations by the transaction hashes, listed below:

106b2abf042d6900e1b15b96d9b9c70e41c483abfae2f5a7932e2eb044d37780 (First top-up, referring to BTC donations)

6f208cd88c9a9717a0221a9b41df38bcb03db3c4976b3667975dd8a07d4af5d8 (Second top-up, referring to BTC donations)

88f80fc980421c0c47f780dbe7f8246f463cb1cbbe7ae2b9ee54d188761c58eb (Third top-up, referring to LTC, XLM and ETH donations)

You are more than welcome to verify that these donations correspond to double of the value previously present at the address.

Pictures

Below are some pictures of the deliveries. We kept these to a minimum to preserve the privacy of the people involved.