Blockchain Is the End of Charity As We Know It

genEOS Official
genEOS
Published in
3 min readOct 26, 2018

Charity is one of those realms that can be transformed by blockchain once and for all. Blockchain can bring transparency in social funding, which is not just essential but vital for this domain. Why? The answer is in this post.

Looking Around Before Giving Money to Charity

Before making some donations, most people want to get the answers to the following questions:

  • How many philanthropists are there?
  • What is their average donation?
  • What will my money be spent on?

It’s not just their curiosity. People ask these questions to understand whether their money will be transferred to the right place. Philanthropists would like to help the needy instead of enriching crooks, so it’s ok to look around before donating. However, the current system is based only on trust and nothing more. Blockchain can turn this upside down.

If the charity management software is blockchain-powered, it can broadcast fair statistics that potential donators are looking for in real time. As such data is decentralized and stored in an append-only way, nobody can forge it with more attractive numbers, speaking from the marketing point of view.

Getting the Math

Usually, when someone gave money to charity, they want to be sure that no scam is there:

  • A contractor has been chosen based on a fair tender bidding result.
  • Purchased goods were fairly distributed among the donatees.
  • No money was misused.

The current system hasn’t developed anything better yet than showing receipts to the donators.

How can blockchain disrupt this approach? There are a few aspects that the technology can take under its control.

First, blockchain can store information about all the stakeholders: donators, employees, contractors, and donatees.

Second, with the help of smart contracts, the system can validate tender participants and trigger payments once contractors successfully accomplish their part of the contract. This way, no money can be spent bypassing smart contracts, which makes expenditures of charity funds transparent for all the stakeholders.

Third, once something is bought or donated for charitable needs, it can be tracked along its way to the destination. Blockchain’s digital ledgers can disintermediate this process, making it not only transparent but cost-efficient as well.

Enjoying Visible Results

People donate real money and they deserve to know real stories.

When donating, people want to feel satisfaction from their actions. They would like to know the very child whose life was saved with the help of medicines bought with the donated money. They would like to know how their donation changed the life of a particular refugee.

Blockchain is an option that can make the charity process easily trackable. If all stakeholders are registered on the same blockchain, donators can check the current state of all the beneficiaries of their donations. It’s possible to look up their personal details, how exactly the fund helped this person or institution, and what’s the share of the exact donator in this process. When people can see real results of their donations, they will be much more likely to keep participating in the future.

What’s There Now?

Charity funds adopt blockchain in different ways.

In 2018, UNICEF launched the initiative called Game Chaingers that appeals to people to share their PC capacities for mining Ethereum and thus help Syrian kids. Blockchain Charity Foundation aims at overcoming poverty worldwide. Alice brings transparency to social funding.

Although more local specialized blockchain-driven solutions are coming, it’s still roomy there for newcomers. Just imagine how many social and cultural issues can be addressed with donations, and how many locations require this. This is a perfect opportunity to become engaged.

A blockchain ecosystem like genEOS can facilitate this process and help to bring new charity-focused solutions on blockchain out there. It already features a ready-made blockchain, smart contracts, digital ledgers, and permission schemes to become a foundational tech platform for such initiatives.

So, How Can Blockchain Help?

Blockchain can make the entire charity domain as transparent for all the stakeholders as never before. It can make donations trackable and the results visible, which will stimulate donators to give more.

As charity funds differ by their locations and goals, this sphere remains spacious for blockchain-led solutions. So, if you’d like to go for it, the most cost- and the time-efficient way is to adopt a ready-to-use blockchain, such as genEOS.

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