DeFi’s Philanthropic Primitive
Welcome!
Endaoment is a new public charity that offers Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs) built atop the Ethereum blockchain.
Endaoment is the nation’s first DAF provider and first 501(c)(3) public charity running on the Ethereum Mainnet.
Our mission to manage and encourage the charitable giving of crypto assets.
As of 2019, more than $120 billion has been funneled into nearly 750,000 DAFs in the United States. We’re excited to bring this powerful and important financial primitive to the crypto community.
What’s a Donor Advised Fund?
A Donor-Advised Fund is a special financial account owned and managed by a public charity (that’s us).
With a Donor-Advised Fund, you can give long-term capital gains assets to a DAF, deduct the full value of the gift and offset other taxable income.*
As a result, the financial vehicle of a DAF has exploded in popularity as families incorporate them into tax-planning strategies and targeted community philanthropy.
DAFs have a Primary Advisor (that’s you), who gives assets to their fund as tax-deductible donations and makes grant recommendations over time to nonprofit organizations.
When you donate tokens to an Endaoment DAF, we immediately sell your gift for USDC via Uniswap and deposit the proceeds at your DAF’s address on-chain.
Once funded, you can direct the dollars in your DAF to specific charities by making grant recommendations to more than 1.5 million nonprofit organizations in the U.S.
When your grant is reviewed and approved by Endaoment, we’ll contact the receiving organization, onboard them into the Ethereum ecosystem and transfer them the recommended grant amount in USDC.
DeFi’s Philanthropic Primitive
The DeFi community deserves its own DAF provider that accepts a wide range of crypto assets and leverages crypto infrastructure and participation models.
To start, our grant-making and nonprofit management logic is built directly into our contracts. Over time, we’ll integrate a broader range of liquidity providers and upgrade our contracts to be fully-composable for use across a variety of DeFi applications.
We can’t wait to see what this enables for developers. So much so, we’re working on our own vision for programmable philanthropy:
We’re building the Endaoment Community Fund — a Decentralized Autonomous Organization that helps oversee a community-owned endowment.
For every action you take on Endaoment (outside of donations to your DAF), you’ll earn voting shares in the community fund. Verified nonprofit organizations can apply for grants from the community fund, and you’ll help determine winning grant applications, as well as vote on Endoament board member seats and policies.
The Endaoment Community Fund is a brand new way to encourage increased grant-making out of DAFs and is a democratizing force in large-scale community endowment funds.
It will result in more cash to organizations in need and more philanthropic engagement amongst donors.
It’s just one of the new ways we plan to leverage a philanthropic primitive in DeFi, serving this new industry with robust charitable gifting & engagement opportunities.
We’ll be sharing more in the coming months about the Endaoment Community Fund. For the time being, get involved by opening up a Donor-Advised Fund and making your first donations and grant recommendations.
We can’t wait to see the causes you’ll support!
*Endaoment does not provide tax advice. Please consult with a licensed tax professional to further understand the impact of opening and contributing to a Donor-Advised Fund
