Why charity needs Blockchain

Blockchain technology is undoubtedly a hot topic at the moment.

According to the Gartner’s Hype Cycle, it nears the Slope of Enlightenment as we speak, but the public opinion is somewhat going between axes of ‘scam’ and ‘speculation’ terms.

But if we forget the pricing aspect of so-called ‘cryptocurrencies’ is there anything in the Blockchain technology to truly make this world a better place?

Let’s have a look at a potential use-case for charity donations.

Although the use of Blockchain is not that straightforward yet as the mass adoption is still ahead, there are some unbeatable grounds to use it.
To name a few:

Transparency of funds collected.
Everyone can see how much and when came in, what’s the status of the charity fund is right now, and what was taken out by whom.
This history is stored in Blockchain forever, cryptographically ensured and no one can tamper it.

Programmable funds distribution
Blockchain fits ideally when the money flow is occurring in a many-to-many fashion. When, for example, there is a trusted pot, which secures the funds from the multiple routes, and under a specific programmable condition splits them over to a group of recipients.

Smart programmable appreciation
Every donator might get an appreciation (a digital item, a ‘collectable’, etc) according to a single rule, in a fair way. Such a rule will act equally for each and everyone.

Open source
All the programmable rules are open sourced and cryptographically proven to be the ones that are used at the moment

Cheap and fast transfers
Donations in cryptocurrencies can be sent at reasonably low transaction costs, regardless of the amounts and geographical location

There are some initiatives out there already examining this approach. One of them is EthKids:

EthKids is an open source non-commercial decentralized protocol for charity donations for children.
Using the dynamic bonding curve model for donations, EthKids tries to solve the problem of short-lasting relations with the donators.
With the power of Ethereum Blockchain and the Decentralized Finance concept, EthKids puts in action conceptually new donation mechanism, where active regular contributors rewarded in a fair way