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In June 2018, the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller caused a sensation in the world of cryptocurrencies when he called Bitcoin a "notable social phenomenon" during a interview with Bloomberg.
While Shiller's views on cryptocurrency are not exactly positive, his description of "social movement" and "enthusiasm epidemic" is not very far.
The reality is that Bitcoin's ethos is very different from the etho (if you can even call it that) of the legal currency, and that the Bitcoin ethos has earned more than a few enthusiastic supporters in the last ten years. years.
The Fiat currency is a system built on the trust of citizens in their "benevolent" governments.
Bitcoinin the meantime, it's something very different.
The idea has been built that trusting human beings to be benevolent is always a lost battle, and that taking away power from banks and governments will benefit the whole society.
Unfortunately, many – perhaps even most – cryptocurrency projects that were created by Bitcoin do not fully share the main ethos.
For example, it seems that countless projects have been initiated primarily to enrich their creators, with no intention of providing value to society in the process.
But now that funding is drying up for blockchain startups, the time is ripe again to focus on the principles on which Bitcoin and the entire cryptocurrency ecosystem have been founded: features such as transparency, resistance to censorship and global transactions. low-cost for everyone.
With this in mind, we will examine some non-profit companies in the world of cryptocurrencies that are committed to promoting this fundamental ethos started with Bitcoin.
As with governments, some non-profit organizations act more benevolently than others.
Without doubt, more than one non-profit organization was founded with the intention of avoiding US securities laws or paying less taxes. However, this is not the case with those on this list.
These are authentic ethical organizations that aspire to use their solutions to improve long-term society.
So, let's get to it.
4 non-profit companies in the cryptocurrency world
BitGive
What better place to start things than with the first non-profit charitable organization of Bitcoin and Blockchain in the world, BitGive, which was founded in 2013.
BitGive is a 501 (c) 3 registered nonprofit in the United States that uses blockchain technology to improve the world of charity in a couple of key areas:
- Transparency: Many non-profit organizations are overly bureaucratic, ineffective or even corrupt, which leads to poor management of donor funds. By tracing charitable transactions on the blockchain, BitGive brings more transparency to the financial operations of non-profit organizations. In turn, this allows donors to consider responsible nonprofits to a much higher degree.
- Efficiency: Charitable transactions often involve sending money across borders from rich to impoverished areas. Unfortunately, the fact that these transactions are linked to the charity does not exempt them from international transfer fees and long waiting times for processing. With cryptocurrencies, these international transfers can occur in a few seconds and for a small fraction of the cost of the old banking infrastructure. This means that more than the money that is donated to charity actually reaches the intended destination, and less is set aside for intermediaries and administrative expenses.
In his History of 5 years, BitGive focused primarily on improving public health and general health / environmental sustainability.
They have collaborated with some notable non-profit organizations including Save the Children, The Water Project and Medic Mobile, among others – helping with disaster relief, building homes in poor communities, building clean water wells in Kenya and more.
In addition, BitGive has just launched a new platform called GiveTrack at the Latin American Bitcoin and Blockchain Conference in Santiago de Chile during the first week of December.
GiveTrack is a donation platform that allows fundraising without borders together with faster, cheaper and more transparent money management for non-profit organizations.
With BitGive and others in the lead, the blockchain has slowly but surely started to transform the global non-profit sector for the better.
Zcash Foundation
Moving from a non-profit technology based on blockchain technology to a non-profit that is building blockchain technology, our next organization is the Zcash Foundation.
The Zcash Foundation is a non-profit 501 (c) 3 dedicated to the cause of the development of a payment and privacy infrastructure for the Internet and serving the users of the Zcash privacy cryptocurrency.
There are actually 2 organizations closely involved in Zcash development and community growth: the Zcash Foundation and Zerocoin Electric Coin Company (ZEC) led by Zooko Wilcox.
Where the latter is a private company dedicated to the development of the Zcash and blockchain protocol, the former is a public charity that works on 3 main initiatives:
- Community growth: Focus on spreading awareness of Zcash and the benefits / needs of online private transactions, as well as facilitating production conversations within the community to help determine the best actions to take in the future of Zcash.
- Protocol and governance: Develop and maintain the Zcash protocol and the open network that powers it so that it can continue to provide financial privacy to the public.
- Research and Development (aka Science): Encouraging scientific research (ie validation, empirical measurement and continuous innovation and refinement) in the future development of Zcash, as well as educating the public on the importance of The mission of the Zcash Foundation.
As described in an excellent Article of June from Leigh Cuen to CoinDesk, the Zcash Foundation mainly focuses on bringing privacy and fungibility technology to global payment systems, regardless of whether Zcash's cryptocurrency itself is maximizing adoption and market capitalization in the process.
That said, the Zcash Foundation gets its funding from a fixed share of 1.44% of the entire ZEC that is mined, so it is in the best interest of the foundation to see the success of ZEC.
However, they have not avoided collaborating with leaders of alleged "cryptocurrencies" competing in which they can help in their mission of making such private internet payment infrastructure a reality for everyone around the world.
It is still young, having just been founded in 2017, but so far the Zcash Foundation has given a solid example of transparency and open governance that may be of interest to the rest of the cryptocurrency sector.
Swarm
With most non-profit blockchain organizations, cryptocurrency comes first and the nonprofit organization later.
In the case of Swarm, however, it is the opposite. Considerable efforts have been made in its organizational planning, so that it can effectively serve the fundamental purpose and be resistant to environmental changes.
Swarm it was initially launched as an association network in the summer 2014 with the development mission smart contracts this could improve the trust, transparency and accessibility of the financial infrastructure.
All together, these initiatives are equivalent to one thing: to democratize finance.
With this huge goal in mind, the Swarm organization has been operating since 2016 as a non-profit association without legal personality.
They quickly established relationships with multiple entities to focus on the hard work of regulatory improvement in the private equity space:
- Swarm Foundation, established in Liechtenstein
- Swarm Operations, GMBH based in Germany
- Swarm Operations, LLC based in the United States
- Swarm IP, based in Singapore
- Swarm Research Foundation, based in Panama
- Systems of quantum holonic swarms, based in the United States
These 6 groups are independent of the Swarm organization.
The Swarm organization is governed by SWM token holders and together determines which entities to use to advance their goals.
All together, this form of collaboration has been described as a distributed collaborative organization, with each side working to create robust token governance systems and to integrate securities confined to the legal and tax systems of the respective nation states.
The Swarm organization is an organization independent of any entity that can use the Swarm platform to tokenize its securities.
Token issuers on Swarm have used special vehicles ("SPVs") that hold the underlying assets in different jurisdictions, such as the Cayman Islands, Estonia, Lichtenstein, etc.
Democratize investments and interrupting the private equity sector it's not an easy undertaking, and certainly does not happen overnight.
Knowing that the operation of Swarm as a non-profit organization allows to prioritize sustainable long-term strategies that can have a profound impact rather than being forced to take short-sighted actions for profit.
Furthermore, it leads to clarity for network participants ensuring platform neutrality. By mandate, Swarm is not encouraged to compete with the same players who are adopting the infrastructure.
Currently, the council of the Swarm Organization has 2 members and 3 seats waiting to be filled.
The co-founders of the project, Philipp Pieper is Timo Lehes, are the 2 active members, while the remaining points will be filled by the votes of the stakeholders using Swarm Voting module on liquid democracy (LDVM) with the SWM token.
Good Commit
We have to bend a few rules with this last inclusion, but it's worth it.
Good Commit it is a reward-based charity market, a fundraising platform and a philanthropic ecosystem on the Ethereum blockchain.
The reason why we are bending the rules is that Commit Good is not in itself a non-profit, but rather a platform which supports a network of over 300 charitable and non-profit organizations, including Habitat for Humanity, Ronald McDonald House, Feed the Children and many others.
In a interview With TechBullion last August, Commit Good CEO Clay Braswell said:
The charitable space will be one of the first success stories that will allow adoption by traditional users [of cryptocurrencies]. The blockchain offers a new level of transparency that will benefit both the donor and the recipient and will become the industry standard for charitable donations.
If you gave a thought to this statement, you will probably see the truth behind it.
Which industry is based more on trust than on charitable and non-profit industries?
It is literally dependent on making people donate and say: Here is my money, I trust you use it for the cause for which I am giving.
If the cause is to feed the hungry, to house the homeless or to treat the sick, people do not give to charity to fill the pockets of the leaders.
People donate to charity to make a difference.
But the sad reality today is that non-profit organizations are not held responsible do the best who can with the donations they receive, and consequently the most needy members of society suffer from it.
Trust and transparency are two things that blockchain can bring to the nonprofit sector, which could completely revolutionize the way charitable organizations operate and how much difference they make in the world.
Commit Good is just one of many organizations working to make it a reality, and you could start to see the impact of this work in most other industries where blockchains break off in the years to come.
