I just purchased an NFT, and part of the cost was sent from my wallet directly to a charity’s wallet. 100% automatic. The charity was a royalty recipient in the contract, so I verified beforehand that the charity would receive the money.
These days we see NFT collections all over Twitter. We also see lots of promises, like “10% of proceeds will be donated to the XYZ fund”. It’s AMAZING to see the generosity of the crypto community. But in a world of contracted interactions, why do I have to trust the creator’s word that a donation will be made? Thanks to smart contracts, we can codify those promises. Build the donation directly into the NFT, where anyone can verify the promise of “10% to charity”. Blockchain gives us this beautiful opportunity for transparency and openness, why aren’t projects using it?
Theoretically, the solution is simple: Just add the nonprofit as a royalty recipient in the NFT contract. But there’s a problem: Nonprofits don’t have wallets.
Why don’t nonprofits have wallets?
There are several good reasons your average charity doesn’t own a wallet.
- Resource scarcity is a common issue for millions of nonprofits. Many want to take part in the crypto boom, but don’t know how.
- Confusing tech and terminology is rampant in the crypto world right now, which remains largely inaccessible to those outside of the Silicon Valley bubble. Nonprofits are left behind.
- Security is a primary concern when interacting in the world of crypto. On the blockchain, your password is your identity — lose it, and you risk losing your assets forever. Nonprofits’ primary concern is serving their cause, not security. Many, especially smaller nonprofits, are not ready to manage the security implications of owning a wallet.
Change is here to help
Here at Change, we do everything we can to make a nonprofit’s life easier. We’ve deployed a wallet for them.
Odds are, we already have an Ethereum and Solana wallet for your favorite nonprofit. If you want to donate crypto to a nonprofit, you can find their Change-operated wallet, and donate there. We manage the security of the wallet, and route the funds to the charity — even purchasing USD for them if they prefer to receive fiat currency.
What do these wallets allow you to do?
Phantom donated 1,111 SOL to Girls Who Code, and rallied a slew of community donations.
Fisker dropped a charitable NFT collection: 5% of proceeds go toward the Ocean Conservancy, and 1% goes toward carbon offsets. These numbers are codified directly into the NFT smart contract, so the donations apply to every resale.
Charity on the blockchain
Change’s nonprofit wallets mean one thing for the crypto world: Charity is now a first-class citizen on the blockchain. Charity can now be built into anything — NFTs, blogging platforms, wallet apps, marketplaces. Now that on-chain donations are made simple, the only question remaining is… What will you build?
