Jon (TLYCS)

Thank you, everybody, for joining us today. I’m Jon from The Life You Can Save, a nonprofit dedicated to helping the 700 million people who live below the international poverty line of $2 a day. We identify and raise funds for highly cost-effective charities that support people living in this condition of extreme poverty. I'm thrilled to be joined by Omar from Crypto for Charity and also Mags, the founder of Double Down, which is a Web3 venture fund. Do you want to introduce yourself maybe? Mags, you go first.

Mags (Double Down)

Sure thing. Consumer culture and Web3. And as I just tweeted, nonprofits are very much brands too, and kind of can benefit in all the same way. So very interesting, this topic.

Omar (Crypto for Charity)

Hello, my name is Omar, and I'm the product lead at Crypto for Charity, which is a platform where you can donate cryptocurrencies and NFTs to support US-based nonprofits and various causes with zero fees. So Crypto for Charity is part of a public benefit corporation called FreeWill with an overall mission to simply raise $1 trillion for nonprofits by creating technology for both donors and nonprofits to make giving easy. Excited to dig into some things we can do with crypto here.

Jon (TLYCS)

Great. Well, Omar, this space is all about doing good with crypto. Do you want to maybe share your story about how you got started doing that?

Omar (Crypto for Charity)

Yeah, sure. First of all, I've been working in tech for maybe almost 20 years now, getting really close to that 20-year mark. Still fairly new to the nonprofit world. So this is my first actual full-time job working in the nonprofit scene.I didn't actually get properly involved in the space until maybe mid-2017 or so, when Ethereum caught my attention. Happy Merge Day, by the way! And since then, I've been pretty active in this space, but I have not really considered donating crypto in the past. I'm more of a crypto hoarder at this point, but I finally did when the invasion in Ukraine started, and I saw Ukraine's official Twitter account posting their ETH address, which then later got verified as it was indeed in control of the Ukrainian government. So then, I donated some there, and since then, on their first day, they raised over $6 million worth. And I thought it was a great example of using crypto to take quick direct action as a global community.

And since then, I've participated in a couple of charity NFT drops, where all the proceeds went to wildlife conservation. And of course, right now I'm full-time on building a crypto-giving platform, so I feel pretty lucky to have more of a focus there.

Jon (TLYCS)

Thank you, Omar. And Mags, how did you get started thinking about crypto for good and what's your story on that front?

Mags - Double Down

Yes, it's funny. Crypto itself started in 2017, but it was more curiosity. It was financial innovation, technical innovation, not a consumer innovation. I'm very much a consumer investor. Why should people care? What's interesting for kind of an average person? And that consumer dimension didn't get started until 2020 or so with the surge of NFTs. I am a FreeWill investor. I also feel like I've been chatting with the founders there for a bit about the intersection between the world I live in and the world they live in. But it didn't really click for me on the philanthropic side until I actually bought an NFT for the Afghanistan Humanitarian Fund. I would probably never proactively choose to donate to Afghanistan humanitarian aid just because I think it was one of those very spontaneous things because someone was selling an NFT with all of the proceeds going to that and the seamlessness of that, I donated it. I didn't even realize in the moment that I was donating money. It was like a very web3 moment for me. And then obviously as I spend more time thinking about brands and engagement and kind of the total realm of the possible, that all kind of started clicking to a place much more intentionally and tactically.

Omar (Crypto for Charity)

That's funny. It was very spontaneous for me too. It's kind of like the whole Apeing In culture. I didn't really think about it much other than making sure it was actually going where it was supposed to go and then just did it.

Mags - Double Down

And that's the funny thing, right? When you think about behaviors that people have had with using crypto for good, it's not that different from the experiences they have using crypto overall, right? Seamless transactions, doing something because it's like interesting and new. Or in the case of Ukraine, it was the funniest thing when they announced they would be doing a Ukraine NFT project for anyone who donated and people just piled money.

Omar (Crypto for Charity)

Yeah, I remember.

Mags - Double Down

It was the most absurd thing, but it worked because crypto apes into things especially when they see the benefit on the other side. And that's just fascinating to me that some things here are very philanthropy specific and some things here are very kind of crypto behavior specific.

Omar (Crypto for Charity)

Jon, what about you? What's your experience so far?

Jon (TLYCS)

So, personally, I think my first experience was also giving to Ukraine. I've donated crypto before that to charities like The Life You Can Save and other charities that we recommend. But to me that had been more along the lines of just donating crypto because there were some tax advantages doing that versus giving cash. But Ukraine, that really felt like something new, like the chance to really support a cause in a way that I couldn't without crypto. And crypto just made it instantaneous and seamless. That was really kind of an eye-opener from The Life You Can Save’s perspective. We kind of had a similar experience where we've been involved in crypto for a while, but it took us a while to kind of ramp up and prioritize it. 

We've been able to accept crypto donations since 2017, but we've only really ramped things up over the last year and a half or so and that was when we got approached by the Fugue Foundation with an opportunity to earn a grant from them by operating an Ethereum test net node. And that experience really got us started down the crypto rabbit hole and then we started looking at ways to accept crypto donations in a more automated and scalable way than the Coinbase account that we opened in 2017.

And that's what eventually led us to Crypto for Charity, which now lets us accept crypto donations of over 100 different assets with zero fees to support our work or the work of any of the 25 charities that we recommend. I'm just excited about the work that you're doing because I know from The Life You Can Save’s experience that it's going to address the biggest pain points around crypto adoption for a lot of nonprofits and really lower the barriers for getting them involved in crypto philanthropy.

Omar (Crypto for Charity)

Yeah, that's awesome. I guess that's a really good segue into the next topic. So kind of like talking about what you see as the potential of web3 and philanthropy, and maybe you can Jon, first go into that since you're kind of on the topic already? 

Jon (TLYCS)

Yeah, I mean, one of the things that we find super exciting about the web3 community is just the sheer number of young people who are being extremely generous, giving much more at a younger age than we see with other donor demographics by a really significant margin. They're not waiting. They're people who are making money and really want to make a difference right away. 

And there are lots of good examples of that. Sam Bankman-Fried is a great example of someone who's done extraordinarily well in the web3 space, and he's not looking to build as much money for himself, he wants to give almost all of it away and not just give it away but do so in a way that is going to maximize the impact of his giving. And that's a really important aspect that's really part of The Life You Can Save’s mission is trying to stretch each dollar given as far as possible and maximize its social impact. And we think that when we look at the crypto community, we see a lot of people who think about trade-offs and optimizations a lot in their day-to-day work and we think that that's going to really translate into using the same kind of optimization mindset in their giving and we're really excited.

Omar (Crypto for Charity)

Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm seeing too. Definitely a big opportunity there to kind of help increase that efficiency and maximize the gains you can do with your donations. 

We can expect the number of crypto users to hit 1 billion sometime this decade. Right now, we're about the 300 million mark. So there's still a lot of growth happening. And like you said, we know from research that crypto investors, a large portion of which are millennials, are disproportionately charitable groups; they seem to be more into giving. And it might be a generational thing, like just a more idealistic generation, and we'll see what the next one is doing. It seems like it's kind of going in the same direction, right? But the really cool thing about crypto is it basically enables new wealth distribution mechanisms which then lead to more philanthropic activity because there's just more wealth being created overall. And traditionally, philanthropy has been seen as an entirely individualistic activity. But with web3, we have these collective decision-making bodies like crowdfunding DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations with tools that streamline financial coordination. And that way they encourage more participation from people that might not have been eager to participate in something like that before.

Omar (Crypto for Charity)

A DAO basically pulls and distributes individual funds under a common goal, enabling the DAO to engage in a much larger scale of philanthropy than its parts could. And as we talked about, the whole Ukraine example. Crypto communities overall have proven to mobilize fast around world events. And when you have decentralized financial tools that are equally accessible to everyone, with almost instant settlement times across borders, making a sizable impact on a global scale becomes a lot easier all of a sudden. And NFT is another great example of the potential; incorporating NFTs into philanthropy as a kind of a way to signal altruism and also simply to make it more fun has shown a lot of promise. Community building around NFTs has been really successful overall. I think a lot of us know NFT communities are very tight and very passionate. And when you combine that with philanthropy, I think it's a great formula. 

I think another interesting thing is quadratic funding. I'm not sure if a lot of people are familiar with it, but it's basically a way of funding projects or giving grants that use a mathematical formula to amplify the donations made by a large community or the contributions made by a small group with big pockets. This basically ensures that a project with a larger number of backers ends up getting a larger chunk of the grant pool. This is basically the funding mechanism of Gitcoin, which is a granting platform. What about you, Mags? What do you see as the big potential in web3 philanthropy?

Mags - Double Down

Lots of things. We covered a number of them. Right. Just capturing the crypto native wealth because it's not just that it happens to be younger. But it's also a very different source of capital and of, nonprofit dollars and also international reach. We keep bringing up Ukraine, which was just very easy to execute if you felt like at the moment you wanted to donate to Ukraine, you could. You didn't have to think through international wires. That ease flows in any direction you want. I think the biggest thing for me that's interesting is, what the data is that there's a barbell to how people approach philanthropy where you don't either because you're too small or too big of a donor and you want it to stay anonymous or you want to flex it. You want that to be part of your expression either because you want those signals to support a given cause or there's an ego thing, right? Like why do people donate to get their names on buildings in universities and whatnot? It's ego.

It's a flex. I donated money and now I get to call this building with my own last name. And so what the potential for crypto is it kind of gets to serve both sides of that barbell. If you want it to be anonymous, you can do a lot more private giving. An example of using Mixers to donate to Ukraine because you didn't want retribution from the Russian government, that's a very real use case, right? Or even how like WikiLeaks uses crypto for donations because they really have government restrictions that prevent them from taking credit card processing. Those are very real abilities to do things with crypto that you can't do elsewhere. And then on the other side. The big flex side. We haven't really had much of an ability to flex your giving in the digital world. That's why I think it was so interesting because people wanted one [Ukraine NFT] and then so how you do scale that and how you allow people to signal their affiliation and signal their support but also signal their flexing of I'm a big supporter of XYZ and I want people to know that. It's no different than any other consumer behavior.

Omar (Crypto for Charity)

Yeah, that's a great point. It's like enabling both sides just in case anyone is curious. So our platform allows people to either stay anonymous or make their information known to the nonprofit and so far about 30% have chosen to be anonymous. The rest actually are sharing that information with the nonprofit which we found to be interesting. Because we originally assumed that most people want to stay anonymous but so far it's been the minority at least. But this is a kind of different type of anonymous, right? Like this is only what they want to share their information with the nonprofit which usually is seen as more of like I think the threshold is lower there like people feel comfortable sharing info with a nonprofit but maybe not sharing their info publicly about donating somewhere. So obviously it's not exactly the same thing, but interesting observation.

Jon (TLYCS)

Yeah, and The Life inCan Save’s experience it's been roughly 50-50, very roughly between donors who want to stay anonymous and donors who don't. So we're obviously happy to accept donations either way. We'd love to receive donor information so we can acknowledge their gifts and thank them, but also happy to receive anonymous donations as well. But for donors, who do want that flex that you're talking about, Mags, I'm curious about how you think nonprofits like us can, over time, use web3 technology to help them flex? I've had some discussions with various web3 communities about trying to use NFT's to really demonstrate the impact that donors are having. And so I'm curious if you have any thoughts on how nonprofits through NFTs or other means can help donors show their support for different nonprofits? 

Mags - Double Down

Yeah, I think with that use case, NFTs are just like a very natural way of bringing crypto into the equation. It's a badge. It's no different than actually what Starbucks is now doing with their loyalty play. You're collecting badges based on things you're doing and when you're spending. And being able to have that badge be a permanent part of your digital record, if you choose it to be, is very different than going to a charity gala and posting a picture on your Instagram, but it actually serves exactly the same function. I think the big thing around how I view it for nonprofits is no different than how I view it for brands, which is it has to be thoughtful in execution because doing NFTs just to do NFTs will not help anyone. And so, thinking about how does it tie to what do you want the signaling to be? And people earn that signal and then where do they get displayed signal, what do they get to do with it? For example, if I am a donor at X level to your nonprofit and I receive a very particular NFT associated with that does it mean that I get some extra perks right around the governance aspect of crypto. We haven't really talked much about it, but there are certain things that people want to be involved with, like, do you grant them that access or you don't? Those are all very tactical, program-based decisions to be made, but I think signaling is like one step where I get to show my affiliation. But what are also the utilities that you can then tack on on top of that for people to feel good and stay involved? It's an engagement strategy as much as a signaling strategy.

Omar (Crypto for Charity)

Yeah, I've been involved in some charitable NFTs drops by the Australian Zoo, which is affiliated with this group called Wildlife Warriors right now, headed by Steve Irwin’s son. And they're doing basically the strategy of multiple drops. For example, people who collect all the drops get extra perks, and they might get a special NFT, and they also get to name some animals. There was some poll by the holders to name one croc, and I forget what name the croc got. But it was a fun way to engage the community, and everyone's excited about it, and there's a lot of buzz about it. And they've executed really well. And I've been following them all pretty closely, and I'm participating in all the drops myself because I think it's really fun and I think it's really cool. And they keep the holders really engaged by just posting updates from the field and sharing stories of the animals they're helping. It's really cool, and it's a great example of things to come. This is just getting started, and people are experimenting with these ways to engage.

Mags - Double Down

Yeah, I love that example is also one that highlights another thing that I think is very important, which is taking a long-term view and not just the short-term, how do I get this donation today? And it can be such an interesting way of building engagement and kind of emotional connection because you're now giving people the opportunity to have direct involvement, make some decisions, and vote on things. If executed the right way, it can really build a relationship in a unique way with a customer base. Right? Like customers in a very unique way, but a customer base that you probably want to have a relationship with for the long term.

Omar (Crypto for Charity)

Yeah, for sure. Looks like we only have eight minutes left, so we wanted to talk about a lot of things, but I think we can cover, like, one more topic. So maybe a little bit about the challenges we currently see in crypto philanthropy world? And Jon, maybe from a nonprofit perspective, what are the biggest challenges? You already mentioned one with NFTs. Anything else that's top of mind?

Jon (TLYCS)

Yeah. Originally, as we were trying to get started, a lot of the challenges were logistical. How do we even set up crypto wallets? If we do accept a crypto donation, how do we convert that into dollars that we can actually use to operate our programs? Can we do all this in a secure way? Does the Board have concerns about environmental issues or anything else? And when I kind of go down this list, one of the things that are really striking for me is that Crypto for Charity really solves almost all of our biggest problems by serving as an intermediary that does all the tricky stuff, is the legal entity that actually accepts the donations and sort of automatically converts them to dollars and issues tax receipts and things like that. It really makes it an incredibly simple process for nonprofits. And this is something that is very new to the sector. This is why I'm so excited about what Crypto for Charity is doing. The fact that you're doing all of this and doing it for zero fees for any US nonprofit, I think it's going to absolutely disrupt the sector, and I'm just thrilled that The Life You Can Save is relatively early working with you guys, and I think what the change is going to lead to is going to be really dramatic.

Omar (Crypto for Charity)

Yeah, hopefully. But yeah, we know that many people in the crypto community prefer to donate crypto if they can for a couple of different reasons. Like one is the tax benefits for donating appreciated assets and resetting their cost basis. The other is simply that they want to raise awareness of crypto. And since crypto eliminates middlemen donating crypto is more efficient, and donating with a credit card, for example, is expensive. The nonprofit saves the fees, and with proof of stake and other nonprofit cryptos, it's also now considered more green to donate with crypto, which is obviously now more appealing to a lot of nonprofits. But like you said, the vast majority of nonprofits are not set up with crypto to accept direct crypto donations, and most of them would rather just not do that due to either the risk tolerance levels or just the lack of insight. So they're looking for easier ways to tap into the fast-growing crypto community. This will eventually change, but we're not quite there yet. So we wanted to meet nonprofits where they are and ease them into web3 before we take them full on into the depths of DeFi. 

That's going to come later. But these nonprofits also don't want to hold crypto since they want to put it to work immediately, obviously. And right now old school fiat is still the way to do that. So that's why we created this platform that facilitates these donations and automatically converts to fiat for nonprofits. Another thing is like most nonprofits don't know how to effectively engage with crypto communities and attract crypto donors. So that's another opportunity where we're hoping to tackle and attract the donors for them. And then another challenge is in order to fully tap into the possibilities of web3, we also need to figure out how to leverage things like DeFi in the future. It's tricky right now simply from a regulations perspective, and that's something I'm actively digging into right now. And I think the fees part is important to note. We felt zero fees was an important thing to do if we want to be successful in creating a thriving crypto-giving platform for both donors and nonprofits. And taking a fee also kind of goes against the whole premise of crypto eliminating fees by third parties. So we didn't want to be part of that. 

And while we hope to create some revenue through optional tips, we're not counting on that. So basically, the model is that the nonprofits who want advanced features like custom donation widgets and features and fundraising insights and general assistance with their crypto fundraising strategy will happily pay a SaaS subscription fee. This is basically the same model we took from our parent company, FreeWill plan, where anyone can go online and create a will and give to charity free of charge. And Freewill.com is actually the number one provider of wills in the US right now. And while it's always free to use, there are nonprofits that want extra help, like custom versions of the tools, marketing strategy, help, and training of their staff. And they'll pay for those services. So that's basically our model. 

We have a couple more minutes left. Mags, what do you think is, like, the biggest challenge right now to kind of solve for crypto altruism? 

Mags - Double Down

Well, it's funny because you can look at challenges from the nonprofit side, and you guys just covered that from every aspect that the nonprofits have. I think, from the user side, what's interesting to me is there's almost, like, completely two separate segments, people who've already been in philanthropy, and they're just kind of very active donors, volunteers, et cetera, and then this whole new cohort that almost tries to do everything. Like web3 native. If you think about crypto, native wealth, a lot of people try to solve everything through crypto. And I think the partnership aspect is that not everything has to be started from scratch as a DAO and kind of done on-chain. There are plenty of people who are solving a lot of really important problems and have been doing it for a long time and have the expertise associated with that. And so, how do you partner kind of crypto native folks and crypto communities with those existing organizations to collaborate on solutions that are kind of bringing the best of both worlds? Because I do worry that you will have a situation where the nonprofits are adding some of these capabilities but not reaching as many of those new donors.

And then, generally, those communities are frequently trying to tackle big problems and kind of create things and are ignoring the wealth of experience and expertise that already exists in the nonprofit world.

Omar (Crypto for Charity)

Yeah, definitely. That's a really good point. And with that, it looks like we're at time. 

Jon (TLYCS)

Well, thank you, everybody, for a great conversation. Thanks, Omar and Mags, for sharing your perspectives. Super valuable and informative. And we hope everyone else found it interesting as well.

Omar (Crypto for Charity)

Yeah. Hopefully, we'll chat again soon. This was really fun.

Mags - Double Down

Thanks for having me.

Omar (Crypto for Charity)

Have a good one. Thanks. Bye.

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