Two new charities, Borneo Orang-Utan Survival Foundation (BOS) Germany and adopt1000families in Nigeria have integrated Dash as an effort to appeal to more potential donors and provide greater security for customers and the charity.

“The Team of BOS is working hard on making the world a better place. They try to improve the circumstances for Orangutans, we try to improve the circumstances for everyone who is in contact with money. So our general motivations aren’t that different, of course we are working in different fields, but there was a general understanding since the first time we met. Long story short: no, it was’t hard to convince them, they just needed to understand what Dash is.”

essra of Dash Embassy D-A-CH discussed how it was not too hard to convince BOS Germany to accept Dash since many of their motivations overlap with that of the Dash community.

Dash users can donate by visiting the “website orangutan.de, click ‘Spenden’ and choose ‘Dash’ or ‘Einzelspende’ and watch out for the Dash logo, click it and coinpaymnts will help individuals to send their donation”.

Silas Umekwe, project manager of adopt1000families, emphasized how Dash helps eliminate many of the unnecessary fees that plague charities.

“A decent amount of money is lost to other physical payment processor. International donations is usually affected by huge fees and offshore charges. If we intend to donate to a cause and some people outside the country are interested in joining the cause a good percentage of their donations will be used in paying charges and the delay in payment also. Hence Dash becomes an easy alternative.”

Dash users can donate by 1) visiting the site www.adopt1000families.com, 2) select the number of families they wish to adopt, 3) select donate with Bitcoin/Altcoin, 4) select DASH, 5) copy address and send coins. Furthermore, Nathaniel Luz of Dash Nigeria says they have gotten other local charities to start accepting Dash such as “Blockchainladies.africa, a non-profit organisation promoting Blockchain education among African women”.

Expanding market reach of charities with cryptocurrency

Charities can often have a global reach such as BOS, which is based out of Indonesia, but has branches around the world to increase donations. Charities like adopt1000families are hyper-localized, but are able to reach a broader audience simply by using the internet as a communications vehicle. Expanding to a wider audience brings in more potential donations, but all wide-reaching charities suffer from payment bottlenecks when accepting donations from abroad and/or in different fiat currencies. Cryptocurrencies offer a potential solution with cheaper fees and faster transfers, but still has work to do until its full potential is realized.

While BOS accepts Dash and “can save a lot of time and money by using a cryptocurrency for the transfer” across the world, essra pointed out that “unfortunately, BOS isn’t at that stage of adoption yet”. He added that “they only accept Dash with FIAT convert through coinpayments” and “do so to get a first feeling since at the moment it’s difficult for the receiving part on Borneo to pay their staff and service providers in Dash and even to convert it into FIAT”. This is why Dash continues to increase Dash pairs on exchanges and increase merchant acceptance; so it become easier for these organizations to shift their operational costs to Dash. Nevertheless, there are charity sectors that have no other choice than to take on exchange rate risks and relatively limited usability by holding and using cryptocurrency donations.

Cryptocurrency provides escape for exiles of the current system

While the current financial system enables nearly limitless usability, it does so with an authoritarian rule since any party can be excommunicated from the system if payment gatekeepers wish to do so. The most famous example is Wikileaks, which lost all mainstream payment processors at once and was left with no other option than to solely rely on cryptocurrency donations. Then organizations such as Free Ross are also fighting for a cause that regulators do not favor and must always be on guard that their mainstream funding sources could be discontinued at any moment.

More recently, Patreon, the popular site to support creators with regular donations, has been accused of banning accounts for political reasons. This quickly caused alternatives such as bitbacker.io to emerge, which offers similar services, but exclusively via cryptocurrency funding. Cryptocurrency not only enables individuals to escape the mainstream financial hegemony, but also allows donors to maintain their privacy, which becomes important if these parties are already on the hot seat from regulators. Dash is able to offer these creators and their donors PrivateSend to maintain privacy, but still store all data on the blockchain to maintain transparency and mitigate undue regulator attention when compared to more exclusively private coins. Dash and cryptocurrency provides opportunities for charities to be more efficient in saving time and money along with granting them more freedom in causes they support.