Today we’re excited to unveil EcoGift, the first solution for making cryptocurrency donations more climate-friendly. We are collaborating with Climate Vault, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization and leader in carbon reduction, to measure and negate the carbon footprint of cryptocurrency donations made via our nonprofit fundraising platform.
With the launch of EcoGift, The Giving Block has become the first crypto donation platform to address the carbon footprint of blockchains.
Read on to learn more about EcoGift, from our vision to our methodology.
Why We Built A Climate-Friendly Approach to Crypto Donations
What motivated us to build EcoGift? Why was becoming a “net positive” platform important to us?
After raising over $125M in crypto for thousands of charities, including many environmental 501(c)(3)s, we heard concerns that the energy it takes to send a crypto donation may be doing more harm than good. So, we set about developing a process for better understanding the carbon footprint of the crypto donations going through our products and platform, and how we could best neutralize them.
As we began building out the framework for EcoGift, we found that the amount of energy used by leading blockchains was quite variable. The more we dug into all of this variability, the more we realized that to properly neutralize the carbon footprint of crypto donations, we’d have to go beyond “offsetting” them.
As the debates raged on around the environmental impact of blockchains, we saw an opportunity to go even further and truly lead on this issue.
We thought, “If we’re already doing all this work to develop an approach that makes crypto donations not bad for the environment, why stop at ‘not bad’?” Which led us to ask, “How can we take the environmental impact of crypto donations from not bad to something a little closer to good?” Enter, EcoGift.
How Our Carbon Negative Initiative Works
From the moment we set out to create the most climate-friendly crypto fundraising platform, our plan has been to go beyond neutrality. With Climate Vault, we developed a process for assessing the carbon footprint of each donation, generating a neutralization recommendation and executing on that recommendation. And then we doubled it. Here’s how it works:
- EcoGift calculates the most accurate estimate of the per-transaction energy footprint of each cryptocurrency donation.
- That estimate generates a calculation for the equivalent carbon reduction efforts necessary to neutralize the impact of the gift.
- We double this recommendation. The first set of carbon permits neutralizes the original crypto donation’s carbon footprint, and the second set of permits just does good for the sake of doing good.
- EcoGift purchases carbon permits from cap-and-trade compliance markets, vaulting them so that emitters cannot use them.
- The vaulted permits get to work removing atmospheric carbon!
The Future of Crypto Philanthropy is Green
As the leaders in Crypto Philanthropy, we help thousands of nonprofits around the world fundraise crypto—including numerous organizations with an environmental focus. That’s a responsibility we don’t take lightly.
Cryptocurrency champions in the nonprofit sector need a means of accepting crypto donations that empowers them to fundraise confidently knowing that the environmental impact is being fully addressed. EcoGift is the first of many steps we will take to ensure that the nonprofits and donors we support can do just that.
As we look ahead, we’re excited to provide all charitable organizations and their supporters with the green way to embrace crypto donations.
Learn more about EcoGift here. And if you want to get in touch, here’s where you can reach us.
With gratitude,
Pat and Alex
