How web3 tools can be used for charity and impact.

Transcript

[Music] thank you welcome ladies and gentlemen to this exciting Workshop about how blockchain and crypto can be used for charity and impact my name is yitzy Hammer I'm from Israel and I've spent the last 12 years deeply ingrained in Israel's vibrant high-tech ecosystem first working for the jdc the leading Global Jewish humanitarian organization as the head of social Business and Entrepreneurship and then as a lawyer at Israel's top law firms working with tech companies and investors on all their

legal matters today I run a legal practice that focuses on emerging Technologies these refer to new technology technology Solutions which are typically highly regulated or have regulation which is forthcoming like blockchain crypto AI big data and others we provide multi-jurisdictional legal services corporate and Commercial as well as Regulatory Compliance helping companies navigate these complexities and remain compliant through my work with tech companies and entrepreneurs I discovered my passion for blockchain blockchain is unlike any other tech industry I've come across the technology the companies the people and of course the conferences shout out to the ECC

folks who have done a wonderful job here are truly incredible and is anyone building this space can attest there's never a dull moment and the same goes for the legal and Regulatory side of the business just ask Ripple coinbase binance or anybody else who's building in this space it's not easy which is why I love working in this industry on constant consist constantly forced to think outside the box to learn new things and to be creative in addition to my passion for technology and Innovation I've always been very involved in community work and volunteering in my other hat when I'm not lawyering I'm working with non-profits either as a volunteer or as a lawyer on a pro bono basis or just some of them as you know

regular mil regular milk low of the middle clients blockchain has so much to offer but unfortunately many early adopters took advantage of Technology's infancy to scam and defraud other users as such crypto made a name for itself as a vehicle to finance drugs and terrorism launder money and scam people out of their money now I know we're at like a web 3 conference so Among Us web 3D gen's that's not the case but if you talk to anybody who's outside of the circle of you know crypto um crypto adapters that's generally the impression that people have when you mention the words crypto and blockchain to them so now that the industry has matured so much somewhat following FTX

and Celsius and uh Terra Luna I think it's time for crypto to write his course and take advantage of blockchain innovation to help make the world a better place so and this is a question that I'm opening to all of you how can blockchain and crypto be used for good anybody it's a workshop so it's supposed to be more interactive yes sir okay that's one tool that could be used I think one problem that's generally commonplace among the non-profit sector is trust right there are a lot of organizations and just open up the news

you're constantly hearing about these big organizations that you donated money to you thought that your money was going to X and it turned out I was going to why you know finding out that Executives within a very an organization are getting paid ridiculous amounts of money or that the money is being sent to somewhere that you didn't think it was going to so trust accountability and transparency these are all terms that we're familiar with within the context of blockchain and the world of nonprofit organizations can certainly do with a dose of environment typically people looked at blockchain but Bitcoin particularly to as something that was bad harmful for the environment because of its energy

consumption now with um with following the merge and with other chains that have launched recently we were able to be more conservative as far as energy is concerned and I think also there have been other applications such as creating markets for carbon credits and otherwise that are that could be where you could take blockchain and you could use it to make the invite to to do good for the environment I mean another use case that's typically spoken about is access to banking for the unbanked giving with crypto which is something that I'm going to talk about a little bit more today access to Art right if you look at the nft industry whatever

you may think about it there were certainly a lot of scams but it also did wonders for bringing art to the masses empowering creators through IP also something that we saw through the nft world where they got really creative with IP look at the board Apes for example or others and web3 tools like Dows nfts and smart contracts all these things we're going to expound on shortly so I think if you look at um blockchain for good we could split it into two schools of action number one would be building companies or platforms specifically geared towards utilizing blockchain technology for good for

example good dollar grow other organizations which are set up specifically to build web 3 tools for giving an impact the other way which is something that I want to focus on more today is providing tools with which existing organizations can incorporate blockchain technology into their day-to-day operations and fundraising strategy so what does blockchain have to offer for existing organizations right not web3 Centric organizations but rather um any non-profit you could think of that's already doing you know wonderful things for the world how can blockchain make what what tools and what benefits

can blockchain offer to them so the first one is transparency and accountability which we spoke about before let's tackle the issue of transparency as I mentioned before this is often cited as a major concern to donors who want to see where their funds are going and what impact they're making with the immutable transparent nature of blockchain we can build trust like never before each donation made can be tracked from origin to endpoint which means donors can see their contributions impact in real time this can create a wave of accountability and Trust something that the philanthropy sector desperately needs another one cutting out the middlemen imagine you're a donor who wishes to contribute to a cause in a remote part of the world with the traditional

banking system the process will be plagued by currency exchange rates Hefty transaction fees and delays crypto can bypass these barriers making transactions almost instantaneous reducing or even eliminating transaction fees putting gas fees aside and maximizing the impact of your donation access to a new donor base crypto philanthropy opens the door to an entirely new demographic of digital native donors and shortly I'm going to bring you a use case where I'm going to be able to show how many of these things can be proven to you know these are these aren't just lines on a slide these are actually things that um that we've that we've seen in real time

um Millennials and gen z's are more likely to own cryptocurrencies than any other demographic group and looking around at the audience here embracing blockchain and cryptocurrencies can help non-profit organizations tap into this new pool of potential donors let's talk about smart contracts self-executing contracts with the terms of agreement directly written into code these can automate many processes in the donation and fund allocation cycle reducing operational costs increasing efficiency they can also be designed to release funds only when certain Milestones are reached ensuring that your donation is utilized most effectively this can also help with dispute resolution which provides a single view of the truth latitude technology creates a distributed shared system of record

among network members that eliminates the need for and disagreements caused by different ledgers this is all generic stuff that I'm sure you're aware of this is blockchain at its finest but it's not just about donations blockchain can also enable decentralized decision making through Dao's imagine a community of donors having a say in your organization's key decisions you democratize philanthropy making it a more participative and inclusive summer organizations May opt to issue their own token through tokenization the organization can offer various incentives to its donors these tokens Can represent voting rights access to services or even to share the outcome of the project they support it's a new way to engage with your

community and encourage repeat donations finally blockchain can provide immutable proof of impact by recording project outcomes in the blockchain we can provide a reputable evidence of the differences your organization and donors make in the world so we've established that blockchain has what to offer in the ways of Charity and social impact two years ago an organization I work with asked me what I thought about selling nfts for charity a donor I'd come to them suggesting it might be an interesting fundraising tool they knew I was doing crypto stuff and wanted to know what I thought we started chatting and given that at that point I had aped into way too many

nft projects which ended up being rug pools I suggested holding off an nfts for a little bit and simply adding functionality for them to receive crypto donations via their website and various different fundraising campaigns while I was working with the Shava team I find that they were also organizing a mission of 65 Runners to go around the New York City marathon and each Runner was tasked with raising 7 500 for Salva or what was like four eighth at the time so I started a campaign to raise the money for the marathon in crypto and it was successful I had been around my whole life but I never dreamed of running a marathon however with with this opportunity presented itself I jumped at it and like

I said I raised the money in crypto in the course of my work with Shava and other organizations I tried various platforms for crypto donations including developing one in-house with one of my clients the BET less the best platforms from my experience are in given and the giving black I don't know how many of you are familiar with these platforms but each of them basically offers a widget which can be embedded in the organization's website and allows donors to make donations in various cryptocurrencies the widget generates a new unique wallet address for each transaction the funds are sent directly to a Gemini Gemini or Circle account and are subsequently sweat in Fiat to the organization's bank account

once a week you don't need to understand crypto or web3 in order to implement these tools any organization can take them put a few lines of code into their website and have this functionality set up in no time I highly recommend both of these platforms although each has its pros and cons and given is cheaper and even offers a basic free option while the giving black has stronger brand awareness and offers marketing plans which help you reach crypto donors in any event after running the marathon which was a completely life-changing changing experience and I recommend everybody run one at some point in your lives the folks at Java wanted more they were intrigued by blockchain and the new functionality of their giving black account afforded them but and I should

mention that they had not opted to purchase giving Black's marketing package they wanted to speak to the people who had crypto organizations are typically well trained in speaking and engaging with their existing donor base but it's hard to appeal to new communities and as I mentioned earlier crypto for the most part is held by Millennials and gen Z's and Chavez donor base were Boomers at best Shava is a tremendous organization which supports families of 2 000 children with disabilities every single day they have a state-of-the-art facility in the heart of Jerusalem that caters to people of varying religions cultures and backgrounds they raise millions of dollars each year to support their operations but they didn't know the first thing about crypto who are these people who prefer Bitcoins and ethereums to paper money and how do

we find them and win them over to shalvis cause they asked me the answer I told them was to organize an event in Miami I grew up in New Jersey and naturally assumed that the United States of America didn't extend beyond Manhattan but I spoke a couple of years ago at Miami nft week and was blown away by Miami's energy especially in the crypto sector we decided that given we were not yet experts at what I like to call cryptanthropy the event initially posed more questions than the provided answers and sought primarily to begin a conversation like the one we're having now which in my mind nobody's really talking about around how can blockchain and crypto be used for good obviously as the host of the event and

as one of the Pioneers on cryptanthropy on the current anthropy playing field the event was also set up as a fundraiser for shalva we partnered up with an artist by the name of melkorin who had done some work for Salva in the past and he digitized some of his Works in his collection and made them available as nfts the proceeds of which were given as donations to shelva we also auctioned off an nft from an OG collection called desperate eight wives who contributed a specially designed shalve in honor of me running the marathon and raising money to for Shava through crypto donations the event was a huge success over 100 people showed up the mayor of Miami Francis Suarez gave a heartwarming keynote address and people keep calling

me congratulating me and asking me to run events for Charities this is a really fun Innovative and well received and yet I wish I could say that chalva raised millions of dollars in Heath BTC and Stables as a result of our efforts but unfortunately that's not the case yet in an industry where people spend literally millions of dollars in crypto on in the words of the naysayers monkey jpegs and treat money like it's of no consequence I kind of expected them to take the same approach when I came to donating to Charities with crypto but for some reason it hasn't gone that way I'm consistently negatively surprised by the outcome of crypto fundraising campaigns

the event raised a few thousand dollars but did not bring the open hand that I had expected I'm still bullish but I'm also realistic I believe this is the way forward and I still encourage adopting these tools so what can or should you or I do about it this is a workshop so in a second I'm going to open up the Florida questions and I want to also hear what your thoughts are um but generally my pessimistic current pessimistic outtake out is is the result of having run one and and then subsequently more and more campaigns in this industry and then seeing what I feel is disappointing results so like I

said what can or should you or I do about it so the first thing we could do is web 3 education right we're here to talk about web 3 and these tools regardless of the fact that in my mind these haven't raised the millions of dollars that some of the some of the organizations I worked with were expecting I still think this is the future just like blockchain and crypto are the future of Finance I believe that they're also the future of philanthropy I believe that in the any organizations that adopt these tools and Implement them in their current fundraising strategy ultimately will not be disappointed um I think more and more organizations should embrace these tools Implement donation functionality on their websites

and take other tools such as Dows nfts token tokenization and Implement them these into their strategies as well I think kryptonropy right giving both ourselves and encouraging others in crypto should be more and more um more and more encouraged and adopted um I practice what I preach um a few months ago I ran another um how Finney was one of the founders of of Bitcoin the one who sent the first Bitcoin transaction died from ALS and every year there's a Bitcoin running challenge I once again ran to raise money in crypto it wasn't it was Bitcoin

um but I think any anybody and everybody should adopt these kind of initiatives for themselves either as an individual level organizational level and another thing which I want to suggest is what I called the giving pledge so um back when nfts were still a thing and artists were creating nft Collections and deploying um various digital artworks in the form of nfts you could code within your smart contract X percentage of royalties which would perpetually go back to the artist so the same way that artists are um are putting these Perpetual royalties in for themselves I think artists I would

like to encourage artists and companies when they launch their smart contracts it could be dexes it could be anybody to take the giving pledge and to implement them through a sport contract a Perpetual percentage of royalties again it could be from a platform or from the sales of a collection that would go to a specific charity this is something that's easily implemented and could bring in you know in a second huge huge outcome for any charity um opening up the floor to you guys um questions thoughts please I think there's a mic going around so I think that

um when we give money to a donation and it's going to buy like a middle damage date so we send crypto money to the to this intermediate and after they send it back to the association that's right sorry my English is not perfect you send money to the intermediary the intermediary sends money back to the organization yes that's that's the way that's the thing is we're talking with just before like about charity like give how do we donate money to Association in crypto yeah in crypto if you wanted to donate money to a charity yeah and the charity has implemented any of these widgets on their website okay so for example you want to give one eth to this to this charity you you uh put in your

uh wallet address um you put in the amount of it could be eth Bitcoin would any almost any there's functionality for hundreds of tokens and you could just send it to their wallet and they get it immediately there's no middleman oh okay okay I didn't understand sorry yeah it's fine thank you no worries um how do you how do you trace um the donations like how how do how do you make sure that it's not being misused maybe even if it is traced that it is um used for the exact actions you have donated the money for so the transaction itself would be Unchained okay

um you're saying even if I if even if I could see that the money went from my wallet to the to the organization's wallet how do I know that they're spending it appropriately I mean if like many people especially people who are not um that uh into crypto let's say they're they're alignments they want to donate how do you make sure that they know how the money is uh sent to which person and how it's used basically because let's say the organization is taking it they say thank you and they're spending it on something else like something for their own use excellent question um all these tools are tools that are available and offered by blockchain okay um in the organization has to adopt them in order to make you know adapt them

through and through so it could be that there's the payment process is set up so the organization receives your donation to their wallet but then they withdrew it and still you know use it to go out and buy a bunch of pizzas um so in order for organizations to fully leverage blockchain the potential of blockchain they need to be fully transparent so that they need to put you know all their expenditures on chain doesn't have to mean that they spend everything on chain but like just making things um making transactions available making information available theoretically everything could go on chain I I know that there's like this uh concept of uh there's this everybody's running to put everything on chain not everything needs to be Unchained but specifically we're talking about accountability and

transparency and and organizations that should be you know public and available for their donors they should put this information on chain but okay it's another step in that I mean if we want to spend the money you're receiving you have to convert it into Fiat money in order to buy I mean at least nowadays uh in the future when everyone uses blockchain okay but you have to I mean right now you are you're saying we are able to donate with Crypt right now right so you're saying in the end of the day everything needs to go to become Fiat anyways today and then once it's in Fiat you maybe it may be less transparent um so like I said like there's their spending could also be put on chain it doesn't have to be spent in crypto it could be spent in kind in Fiat

um but you could but you could make your you could make your transaction history or whatever whatever whatever it could be receipts it could be um any kind of information you could put it on chain theoretically again anybody could do that it doesn't you don't have to have so you're scanning the receipts and you're uploading it theoretically it could be I'm saying these are these are these are tools that that blockchain offers and I'm we're taking a long-term approach here generally right not everything could be done tomorrow um not everything should be done tomorrow but ultimately um that will be the way of the future and how does your because you you talked about you raised money for certain events or for certain correct charity events

um how how do you make sure that the people who have paid the money in um get the transparency so those donations are made through one of the platforms I spoke to we work primarily with in given and the giving block and everything is you know transparent on chain and they support multiple chains and multiple currencies it's it's all done you know in uh okay not through the platform hi thanks for your presentation um I was wondering so sometimes I use a platform called doing good d-o-i-n-g-u-d so it's maybe you're familiar with I'm familiar with them yeah yeah so um so for the for me the rest of the the

crowd um it's you put your nfts on there and then you actually designate a charitable recipient while so rather than the royalty going back to the artist which which can still remain the artists can still get their royalty but on top of that um there's also that charitable aspect so you can if you want to give to the Red Cross for example you can just put that into your nft when you post your nft on on doing good for other words you upload your nft you put up a sale price and you write 20 of the proceeds will go to the Red Cross for example yes precisely yeah yes that's similar to what I was talking about the giving pledge but here instead of having to be a Creator you could be any individual

could do that that's that's that's amazing and that's that's the way forward as far as I'm concerned I think more and more people need to be using doing good in other platforms and you know just everything you know we just look at um look at volumes from like defy like there's billions of dollars that being traded daily like small small fraction of that could be sent to a charity and it could make a world of a difference yeah for sure and just uh one more thought to that point is um you know like what about rather rather than having to maybe put a whole nft collection together to raise funds for a marathon for example what about um putting you know

initializing a PO app or a badge or something like that just so that somebody if they are donating as this gentleman was raising the point of like what's the where's the impact report um I wonder if that could maybe be sort of like a quasi kind I love all these ideas I also like initially when people anybody who donated money to my campaign that wasn't in crypto I still sent them a Pro app as like a token of things I just think that web3 generally has so much to offer like we just touched on like a little bit of it but like taking any of these tools and Implement and I think a conversation needs to be had with organ with existing organizations that are not web3 Centric about how can these tools Empower your organization that's kind of what I do um I go around

and I sit with organizations and we talk about what these things are like we talk about web 3 adoption all the time and it's like it's it's a It's a Grind with any web 2 company it's no different with charitable organizations it's just that the impact is different here so just sitting down having a conversation understanding their day-to-day operations and how um how any of these things that we spoke about um uh uh where are we now um education donation functionality Dows nfts tokens all these things can be relevant to a multitude of different organizations and it's just a matter of you know sitting down and having the

conversation understanding how they could be implemented I wanna that's what I'm here to do to you know spark this conversation I just don't think enough people are putting a focus on it um and you know you guys are all ambassadors now you just go home and speak to the organizations that you're that you're aware of tell them you know I'm passionate about this thing called blockchain and I really think that I could bring a lot of value to you into your organization let's sit down and have this conversation any other questions yeah sure foreign so I think one thing that was wasn't mentioned based on the question that was asked by the gentleman who just left is about oracles so obviously there's this

quote garbage in garbage out I think once data is on a blockchain you can trust that it lives transparently with Integrity But ultimately if something's been spent in the real world there needs to be an off-ramping process and the same way that the tokenized carbon credits market and systems using like decentralized oracles to be able to trust that any data that is recorded onto the blockchain and anything that happens once it leaves the blockchain is done so as transparently and as fraud proofly that's not a word but you know what I mean as possible another thing that could also be applied is different funding models so not sure if you've heard of optimism's retrospective public goods funding so this is when something is funded once the action or the impact is actually realized so instead of

funding things before they happen hoping for the best you're only funding it once the impact is actually taking place so I think putting these two things together one oracles and one alternative funding models can give the donor more assurance that the money that they're putting to use is doing what it's meant to and I I think that's a great solution hello um yeah we're thinking about taxes because you mentioned that as one of the main benefits and I understand that for individuals when you do a small transaction but what happens with organizations that they might want to

transfer big amounts and I don't know if they also need to use a tax deduction for doing their responsibility social responsibility part so I don't know how that works for big amounts or how would that work at least it would work am I understanding it will work the same as it would for an individual you'd have those same tax benefits and a large scale that you would on a on a smaller individual scale as well so you could donate as an individual you could donate as a corporation and you'd have those same tax benefits at least you know I mean tax benefits it would you'd have a tax deduction [Music]

yeah yeah so this is taken from a report that was issued um just like a couple months ago by the giving block um it's like the uh a lot of really interesting statistics of uh over giving through the blockchain um despite what I said about being um pessimistic over um you know uh for the outcome of some of the fundraising campaigns that um I've seen there there's like millions and millions of dollars that are donated in crypto every year probably not on the individual level probably more on the corporation level that you're talking about and one of the main benefits for that is because of the the um the tax benefits so if you're a Trader or if you're you know anybody who's had any nfts in the last

two years you have a lot of losses that you can recognize um in addition if you um you you [Music] um if you if if you make donations in crypto okay um and they're they're recognized from a tax adjustable perspective as a 501 3C in the United States or I don't know what the um what that translates to here in France um you could um get it you get you can get a tax rebate from the from the tax authorities so it's but is that a tax benefit in the states or like where it depends right again I'm aware of uh of the tax benefits available in the United States and in Israel I'm not aware of what's um but I'm sure that it's like almost the

same thing because okay um we've seen I mean we see donations coming in from all over the world I I'm not familiar with the ins and outs I'm happy to put you in touch with uh colleagues of mine who are upstairs who are you know more familiar with that here in France okay awesome uh one more thing I I was thinking about something that she said um or that you also mentioned about donating like a small percentage on every transaction maybe I don't know if there's already something like that but maybe it could be a good snap it would be a plugin for metamask that would be optional but you can select on every or with each transfer a small amount to to transfer to an organization it's just an idea that that could be

yeah I I I'm I'm up for any ideas like this is we sparked an interesting conversation here I think there's a lot of work to be done um like I said each each one of you guys are ambassadors going forward where you know if you're developers you can go and develop these uh Solutions if you're um you know if you're working with organizations you could start implementing these today and you have my contact details here if you want to reach out and have questions um thank you guys very much [Music]