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Christmas is the season for giving—so if you’re looking to spread some festive cheer by donating to charity, here’s how you can do it with your hard-HODLed cryptocurrency.
From exchanges that donate some of their earnings to charity, to programs which mine cryptocurrencies for charity, there’s no shortage of ways to make the world a little bit kinder. Want some inspiration? Decrypt’s here for you, bud.
Donate Bitcoin (and other crypto) to charity
Charities have been an early adopter of crypto, with an ever-growing number of non-profits already accepting direct donations of cryptocurrencies.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is one such non-profit. Its goals gel well with the principles of cryptocurrencies, as it fights for “privacy, free expression and innovation”. Now accepting Bitcoin and Ethereum, supporting the EFF is a great way to defend the digital freedoms that have made cryptocurrencies possible.
Prefer to support an apolitical cause? Try The Water Project, a charity that provides water for impoverished communities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Donors can check the blockchain’s immutable ledger to make sure donations are going to the right place. Donations can be made using Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin. You also have the option of making an anonymous donation—if you want to commit an act of true selflessness.
Other charities are following suit; just last month, education and equality charity The Mona Foundation enlisted The Office star Rainn Wilson to encourage HODLers to donate their “worthless crypto”, opening up its donation channels to support Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, Litecoin, and the USDC stablecoin.
And earlier this year, UNICEF announced the launch of the UNICEF Cryptocurrency Fund, which enables the global children’s charity to receive and hold donations of ether and bitcoin. You can donate directly in cryptocurrencies to UNICEF France and UNICEF New Zealand. For UNICEF USA and UNICEF Australia, you’ll need to contact them directly for further details if you want to donate in crypto.
Serve up Lunch for Children with Binance
Some crypto exchanges are getting into the giving spirit, too. Binance has its own philanthropic arm, the Binance Charity Foundation, which has been running a project called “Lunch for Children”. The program accepts donations of Binance’s own currency, BNB, which—thankfully—has shot up in value this year. Binance also donates some of its own profits to charity as well, with the number now above $3 million.
Donate via The Giving Block
December 3rd—the day after cyber Monday—marks Bitcoin Tuesday, a new charity crypto fundraiser run by The Giving Block, an organization that links crypto philanthropists with charities including the Dementia Society of America, the Human Rights Foundation and the Lupus Foundation of America. The Giving Block gives NGOs the oportunity to automatically convert cryptocurrency donations to US Dollars.
It may even ease your tax burden: “The reason donating crypto directly to charity is so important is because of the tax benefits. As a donor, when you give appreciated crypto directly to a nonprofit, you can transfer the full amount without paying capital gains tax. The nonprofit gets a larger donation, you get a larger write off, and the IRS gets nothing,” Patrick Duffy, co-founder of the Giving Block, tells Decrypt.
“It helps crypto go mainstream as well. The more people who donate crypto, the more nonprofits will take it and people will adopt the technology,” says Duffy.
Lend your processor power to mine crypto for charity
It’s also possible to mine cryptocurrencies for a charity of your choice. Charities that facilitate this include UNICEF Australia’s The Hopepage, animal charity ASPCA, and veterans charity Wounded Warriors. The programs do cost money, as mining cryptocurrencies requires an immense supply of electrical power, but the cost of electricity will be a fraction of what you can raise for charity. Most of the programs also “scale back”—if your computer needed to perform a computationally intensive task, the crypto program will reduce the amount of power it uses.