The Charity Sector Is Breaking. Can Ethereum Help Fix It?

Transcript

[music] [music] >> Thanks very much, everyone. Uh with what is left of my voice uh from a very, very busy Devcon, I will try and take you through some very, very quick concepts around the charity sector, which is where I built my career. Um I first came to crypto, so I've been in the charity world for 17 years building and scaling charities. Um and I came to crypto when um I became incredibly frustrated when I wasn't able to send cash to a friend of mine in Afghanistan. This was legally earned cash. Uh I knew it was being deployed for charitable purposes, but the legacy system said no. And so I became very

interested in the role crypto could play in supporting the global charity sector. And the global charity sector is in a bit of a difficult time. So for the first time in a very long time, our donor base is shrinking. People are losing trust in the charity sector. Um and there's high friction. So legacy systems are ludicrously unfit for purpose for a for a international aid sector that relies on moving volumes of money from aid actor to people in need, um it's time-consuming, it's frustrating, it's sometimes impossible. And so we have got a system that's set up to fail the charity sector. And this is why I came to crypto and

specifically Ethereum because the things that are sort of baked into Eth at its very core, transparency. So it's actually quite straightforward. It's easy to see where money has gone, where money has come from, um and you can share that with the people you want to share it with. Historically in legacy systems, that's been difficult to prove or it's been difficult to evidence. And for someone like me who works for a funder, it's incredibly useful to have that transparency baked in. It's programmable. So it can effectively do my job for me. When certain parameters are met, be it by the person delivering the work, be it by the situational context of the environment, the money can be released. So, you can set up and program large-scale

interventions to effectively run themselves. And that that's incredible. That really really saves a lot of time because anyone who's worked in international development will tell you there are massive time sinks in trying to to deploy money. It's obviously fast. You can act without intermediaries, so you you can operate with full trust and not be told no by banks, by local agents, etc. And it's an emerging donor class, too. There are people getting very rich in crypto. And these people recognize all of the benefits of crypto to to democratize access to financial systems. And so, it's making the donor pool younger, and we're starting to see people give in

crypto and give from crypto wealth. Ethereum also has a bunch of other benefits, some of which you heard in earlier talks this morning. So, obviously neutral and public. No company or government controls it, which means it gives power to the aid sector, gives power to charities, which historically they haven't had. Historically, charities have had to cede power to banks, to governments. And and and Ethereum gives us a way to to take it back. The contracts can outlast vendors, so permissionless smart contracts can be baked in in permanency. So, so you you you can create a system that works not just in one aid development in deployment, but across a whole host of aid deployments.

There's there's new concepts that you can build around staking yields. So, so we work with Launch Notes who is at the front row. And and stake you create create your opportunities to stake stable coins and stake Ethereum gives you opportunity to to to create wealth and resource that otherwise would not exist. And likewise, it it's open, so you've got the ability to open source everything you build and share it with other charities. And so, what we're seeing in the early stages of this being deployed in in big development is that people are doing that. So, they're creating systems that work and they're sharing. Um and, you know, historically the charity sector has been very open to sharing. It feeds very, very nicely into the ethos of Ethereum that that should continue with

this technology. And what does it look like in practice? Well, what we find in the charity sector just could go into massive amounts of detail on this, but generally it's the big actors that can afford to innovate. For most small charities, innovation is keeping the lights on. It's keeping people paid. But the big charities have got uh the the budget and the resource to explore this technology and implement it in their work and then open source it to make it available for others. So, the GSR Foundation that I run is in a partnership with UNICEF uh where we've been really working with the UN and other UN agencies to understand the value of um crypto in the aid ecosystem and Ethereum Foundation was a founding partner of the

crypto fund uh and we've subsequently supported that to build out some great really, really useful pilots in how this technology can be used on the ground. But again, it's important to recognize that that that in this space there are a lot of pilots, tons of data coming in from pilots as to where it works and where it doesn't work. What the GSR Foundation is trying to do is operationalize it. So, find what works and then roll it out to the real world so that we can actually take this technology from pilot to scale. I mentioned launch nodes. So, we've also got this new technology where you can take your Ethereum balance, stake it, and then donate the yield to a charity like a donor-advised fund, but it can be set up in two clicks. It's incredibly powerful and an important part of the

future. Uh we have Rahat here who are um a very, very proud partner of we're very proud to have them as a partner. During the recent Nepal floods, um their deployment of parametric insurance is an incredibly powerful use case, especially with weather prediction technology becoming a lot better. We can trigger a smart contract, we can deploy aid, so people can prepare for disaster rather than repair after disaster. So, it creates more efficacy in the insurance system. In conclusion, a massive massive fan of Ethereum.

More transparent, cheaper, faster, easier to verify, and it solves so many of the problems that I've had when I've built charities in my early career. Thank you very much. >> [applause] >> Question from the audience. What is amounts deployed today in crypto versus, you know, traditional traditional money? >> Great question. So, so obviously the the the the system is still weighted very much towards the legacy system. So, so what we're seeing now, the big evolution we're seeing is from resource assistance. So, this is like World Food Program giving grain or whatever to a cash assistance. So, the recognition and and the rise of

organizations like Give Directly, we're seeing the recognition that actually it's actually far better to give people cash to solve their own problems than it is to try and steward the resource. And with that evolution, which is a profound evolution, we're also now beginning to see that deploying crypto, stable coins particularly, is a far better way of doing cash assistance programming because obviously, you know, if you're working in a war zone where the currency is devalued to nil, giving someone a wheelbarrow full of cash is actually less useful than giving them 300 stable coins. And we're we're beginning to see big aid actors move stuff on chain. So, it'll start with the big partnerships like UNICEF, but for me the real test of this is does this scale to real world, and that's what we're trying to prove.

>> Can you give any numbers? I mean, how much >> I don't have any I don't have any It's more kind of output-centric at the moment than outcome-centric, but there are I mean, you know, World Food Program for the first time is doing cash assistance, and they're looking to move to stables. So, yeah, I don't have any numbers, sorry. >> May I have another one? >> If if there's time. >> No, sorry. That was it. Sorry. >> [music]