Notes: the addresses mentioned in the report could be no more managed by the owners, please check the charity wesbites before making a donation!

This is the first ever report that analyzes all the public crypto addresses belonged to charitable organizations.

The research, conducted in collaboration with Helperbit, shows that more than 13,340 BTC and the equivalent amount of $200+ million in cryptocurrency have been donated to charities that have this method of payment.

The report takes into account about 130 entities, included registered charities and 501(c)(3) organizations, community movements, social innovations (supported by Pineapple Fund), crypto fundraising platforms and some reported charitable initiatives.

Foundations and “donations” linked with Initial Coin Offerings have not been considered, only donations to charitable causes.

The following data are referred only to crypto addresses on the blockchain, where charities proved to own them or donors published references about specific transactions, therefore the report does not analyze most of the transactions that passed through payment processors. The real volume of donations could be much bigger!

Bitcoin Charitable Initiatives

Pineapple Fund, defined as an experiment in philanthropy with cryptocurrency wealth, was an initiative lead by an anonymous individual, which donated 5,057 bitcoin ($55 million at the time) to 60 charities. With this action, about 38% of all the bitcoin ever donated to nonprofits came from Pine. The initiative was launched in December 2017 and, as stated in its website, the call for proposals received more than 10,000 applications.

This was not the unique charitable initiative launched on Reddit (r/Bitcoin, which counts over 1,2 million subscribers): for example also a user pledged to donate 25 Bitcoin ($280,000 at the time), 1 each day until Christmas, to a cause suggested by that channel (source).

Analyzing the charities, BitGive was the first government-recognized bitcoin & blockchain nonprofit to receive 501(c)(3) status from US government in 2014. They also ran charity drives on Bitcoin Black Friday in 2013 and created Bitcoin Giving Tuesday in 2014.

Key BTC Statistics

There are approximately 200 addresses belonged to charities, whom 90% are BTC addresses. Among the charities that currently have bitcoin/crypto form in their donation page, about 40% use payment processors for direct crypto-to-fiat exchange (21% BitPay, 14% Coinbase Commerce, 5% other service providers). The remaining 25% of charities set up their personal wallets and 35% used a crypto donation platform.

The charity with the highest number of transactions (26,500) and volume of donated bitcoin is Wikileaks, that received more than 4,043 BTC (address).

The first ever bitcoin donation to a charity happened on May 2011 (address) and was addressed to the Free Software Foundation. At the time, the average bitcoin price was $3,41!

The charity manages also the oldest Litecoin charitable address, with the first transaction received on 8th February 2013 (address).

In relation to the biggest BTC donations of all the times, 2 of the top 3 transactions were made by Pineapple fund:

– 320.8 BTC ($5,3 million) were donated by Pine to GiveDirectly (address);

– 281.1 BTC ( $1 million) were received by Charity water (address);

– 274.3 BTC ($2,1 million ) were donated by Pine to Institute for Justice (address);

Key statistics of other cryptos

The volume of Ethereum donations is negligible in comparison to BTC ones and only Methuselah Foundation received 500 ETH ($300.000) on its personal wallet (address).

The amount of cryptocurrency donated to charities, equal to $212 million, is mainly the sum of these components:

– Fidelity Charitable declared to have raised over $100 million in crypto for nonprofit organizations (source) and probably most of them are not included in the analyzed public addresses;

– in June 2019 Ripple Co-Founder donated $25 Million in XRP to San Francisco State University (source);

– Ripple gave a donation in XRP worth $29 million to support public schools through the DonorsChoose charity fund (source);

– Ripple also donated $50 million to 17 universities globally as part of its University Blockchain Research Initiative (source);

– Ashton Kutcher has donated $4 million in Ripple (XRP) to Ellen Degeneres’ Wildlife Fund (source);

– Givecrypto raised $4 million (source).

Despite cryptocurrency donations represent 1-4% of the used payment methods (as mentioned in our previous blog post), these data show a tangible impact of BTC donations for some nonprofits, that were early adopters of this technology. Those charities not only received funds to pursue their social goals , but also improved the visibility of their brands, becoming a point of reference for crypto charitable activites.

If your charity is interested to setup a bitcoin wallet and start a fundraising campaign for this #CryptoGivingTuesday, have a look at how to accept bitcoin donations or contact us and get helped to join the crypto movement!

Image: courtesy of Helperbit.