(Video) How GiveCrypto Has Helped the People of Venezuela & Where We’re Going Next

Thanks to our generous donors, GiveCrypto has raised $4 million to date.

This has been a huge step toward our goal of helping people in need around the world by sending them cryptocurrency.

With these donations, we’ve been able to help widows of the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar, support domestic violence victims in the U.S. and give Venezuelans valuable resources to buy food in a broken economy.

Now, after a year of exploring what can be done around the world with crypto charity and dedicated ambassadors, we’ve decided to focus our efforts on a Venezuelan pilot project in 2019.

To highlight the work we’ve done with crypto — and give you a look into our next project — we’ve produced this video. We hope this shows the potential positive impact of crypto charity globally and the ways we can continue to grow as a force for good.

At GiveCrypto, we’re working to help people living in emerging markets, struggling economies, and humanitarian crisis areas. We have focused most of our efforts on areas where war, inflation, or abuse has trapped recipients in dangerous situations.

So far, we’ve rolled out small-scale experiments in different regions in order to find out where we can have the greatest impact, maximize learning, and develop larger-scale projects in the future.

Building a Crypto Economy in Venezuela

After our 2018 experiments with crypto in Venezuela, we saw an incredible opportunity to build financial security for financially strapped families.

The country’s struggles revolve around the Bolivar’s 99.99% value loss compared to the U.S. dollar since 2013, dragging the economy down with an inflation rate of 80,000% per year.

Imagine waking up and finding that your hard-earned savings, rainy-day funds, and cash are essentially useless.

This is the reality many Venezuelans struggle with today, thanks to astronomical inflation. Inflation has made it difficult for them to afford basic necessities like food and home goods for their families and has undercut virtually all future financial stability.

Additionally, because of shortages of food, medical care/supplies, and cash, more than 2.3 million Venezuelans have fled their country since 2015.

How our experiments have aided Venezuelans so far

Without the success of our initial Venezuelan project last year, we wouldn’t be able to move forward with confidence in our first pilot program.

Initially, we had tried to distribute crypto to recipients in the small town of Santa Elena de Uairen near the Brazil-Venezuela border. Our plan was to provide $1 per day for three months to 50 families. However, this project ran into a number of issues, including limited access to the internet, difficulty finding enough participants, and our local partner stepping away because of family issues.

However, when we found a new local partner, we realized that the project would likely work better in a different town. We were able to recruit 100 families and started making transfers.

This project not only gave the recipients more buying power in their community but also inspired one to add a cryptocurrency option to her personal business, giving others a cash-out option. We think this could create an opportunity for future “cash-out” ambassadors.

We also set up a physical faucet at a butcher shop in Venezuela that accepts crypto as a payment option. We gave $10 in ETH to 49 people who followed the faucet’s instructions. Additionally, through a partnership with AirTM, we experimented with giving $25 to 194 people in Venezuela and Argentina.

Using local knowledge to connect with those in need

Based on our previous experience, we quickly realized that we wouldn’t be able to maximize impact without a scalable way of reaching, recruiting, and teaching recipients how to use crypto in their communities.

This meant we not only needed to help recruit vendors who would accept crypto, but we also needed to find someone with on-the-ground knowledge who could coordinate our projects.

Out of this analysis came our plan for The Venezuelan Ambassador Pilot.

The pilot will be rolled out in four phases focusing on exploring test locations; scaling ambassador and recipient numbers; leveraging our software platform; recruiting cash in/out partners for recipients.

But the remote nature of this project presents challenges to our team, mostly related to potential fraud. We’ll be vigilantly incorporating fraud prevention and detection mechanisms into our growing platform and reporting on these measures as we learn more.

Through this pilot, we hope to empower the people of Venezuela to take hold of their financial well-being through cryptocurrency while we develop a scalable, cost-effective way to launch our program in other geographies.