The crypto industry is
often criticized from the outline for creating wealth that exists only in
digital form, is unstable and driven by greed. That’s why a new charity
initiative from top figures inside the Ethereum community might make a few
non-believers sit up for a moment.
GiveDirectly, a
charity that provides no-strings-attached grants to the world’s “extreme poor,”
has revealed it has received a $1 million donation from OmiseGo, a fintech
startup that held a $25 million ICO last year to develop a decentralized
payment network, and Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin.
The donation will go
towards a GiveDirectly campaign in Uganda
An initial pilot
project reached 4,400 households (covering an estimated 21,500
individuals) with $650 which the recipient can choose to use in any way they
wish. GiveDirectly said it is “looking to scale significantly over the
next year” on the back of this new donation and others.
GiveDirectly is backed
by a range of well-known tech names including Google, eBay founder Pierre
Omidyar, and Facebook co-founders Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes. The
company opened its donation drive to the public in 2013, and since then it has
raised over $200 million. Now it is looking to work more closely with the
crypto industry, both in terms of high-profile figures and crypto enthusiasts
themselves who can take part in the Uganda
“This is a major new
chapter for us, entering the humanitarian space with a service to give money
directly to refugees,” GiveDirectly’s head of communications Catherine
Diao told TechCrunch. “We’re really excited to be working with leaders in
the crypto community to translate some of the recent boon to impact for some of
the poorest people in the world.”
To clarify, recipients
of the donations themselves won’t receive crypto, instead, it is switched to
local currency and transferred either using mobile money services or a
traditional bank transfer. But some of the principles behind cryptocurrencies
themselves do apply to GiveDirectly.
The charity aims to
offer a more efficient model that lets recipients receive a larger chunk of
donations than regular charities (it claims to be at 85 percent), while it
carries out thorough checks on recipients before they receive the money and
documents how they spend the capital, too. A ‘live feed’ tracking how the
donations are impacting lives is here.
“While cash transfers
have been used in humanitarian contexts before, this initiative is a
significant departure from the status quo because we’re giving families
transformative amounts of money versus small, subsistence amounts,” Diao
explained.
Ethereum
founder Vitalik Buterin made the donation to GiveDirectly alongside OmiseGo
“The
crypto economy has grown immensely over the last year, bringing a great deal of
wealth to many people and organizations within the ecosystem. In part we simply
see an exciting opportunity to share that wealth. We hope the fortunes made in
the crypto space will lead not to extravagant lifestyles but to extravagant
generosity,” Jun Hasegawa, CEO of Omise — OmiseGo’s parent company —
wrote in a blog post.
Anyone wanting to take
part can send ETH or other ERC-20 token donations to the GiveDirectly
wallet: 0xc7464dbcA260A8faF033460622B23467Df5AEA42
(It looks like the big
donation hasn’t come just yet, fwiw)
Separately,
OmiseGo said it will explore the
opportunity to include GiveDirectly on the decentralized payment that it is
developing. Called the OMG network, it is planned to allow transactions between
any individual in the world, be that consumer or store, instantly and without
the payment fees that exist today.
“We have a strong
desire to support GiveDirectly’s unconditional cash transfers on the OMG
Network in the future when it becomes possible,” Althea Allen, ecosystem
growth lead at OmiseGO, told TechCrunch.
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