XRP’s tech and GSG’s aid aim to bring new sense of transparency to charities

The XRP community, often touted as an ‘army,’ has been leading the charge in developing the XRP ecosystem. Tipbot is one such development, with its availability paving the way for users to tip anyone with XRP. Therefore, it was only a matter of time before this tech trickled-down to a sector it was yet to be applied to – Charity. A sector that recorded over $410 billion donations in 2017, has now embraced the changing tides of Finance and tech.

GoodSoulGroups Charities on Twitter, home to six charities, has implemented a similar bot to accept donations in XRP on Twitter. Developed by Daniel Siedentopf, the GoodXRP bot splits the donated amount equally among all six charities.

Tweet to donate

GSG_Charities on Twitter supports six charities that include St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, New Story charity, Children on the Edge, Happy Kids Dirty Hands, and two other initiatives supported by WanderingWare and Bigbuckor.

This group uses the existing tech in XRP Tip Bot, while adding some variations and dubbing it the ‘GoodXRP’ bot. The bot enables people to donate to GSG_charities’ Twitter handle, @GoodXrp, which then splits the donation equally among the six charities it hosts.

Daniel Siedentopf spoke to AMBCrypto about the functionalities of this service. Apart from splitting the tips, the bot also updates people via a tweet about their donation, he said.

The most important aspect of any organization receiving money from others is transparency and any tip allocated to this page is displayed on the stats page.

Source: Twitter

AMBCrypto got in touch with Jason Langston and Ramon Ramentol to discuss the impact of crypto-Twitter on donations.

Jason Langston, a member of the UK-based Children’s on the Edge charity, spoke to AMBCrypto about the issues faced by many overseas workers sending money home, an issue which could be solved with XRP. He said,

“It solves the time issue being able to send value in seconds and reduces the costs to next to nothing, this could make a huge difference in these people’s lives.”

Langston proposed the idea of using XRP to fundraise, with Langston having raised $4250 for his charity since. The availability of data for XRP donations and the 5-XRP limit on the bot has helped GSGCharities create a transparent community.

Ramon initiated a campaign called ‘One More Home.’ In January 2019, looking at the support received by other GSG charities, he decided to take his campaign to Twitter. He said,

“After seeing the success not only of StJude’s XRP campaign but also the work of BigBuckor, cranders71, Wanderingware and cpilots17 I felt inspired and decided to take my campaign to CryptoTwitter.”

Transparency in Charity

Ramon and Langston are two individuals who work outside their philanthropic interests and run individual campaigns. However, they told AMBCrypto that the amount generated through donations is handled by their parent organizations. Ramon said,

“The processing of XRP donations has been very straightforward so far thanks to the convenience of the XRP Tip Bot and Nixer’s tipbot stats page. Onemorehome is a long term project where the idea is to hodl and leverage on the increase in value of xrp to maximize the impact of the donations, however, the first donation ($333) has been already deposited to NewStory and the experience was seamless.”

Despite the work done by these men, the charity appeared to be restrictive to only XRP. While Ramon wasn’t open to donations in other cryptos, given the availability of logs and stats page that would allow full transparency, another charity #HappyKidsDirtyHands accepts donations in various other cryptos. Craig Anderson of HKDH Charities told AMBCrypto that it accepts donations in Tron, EOS, Brave, and Nano. Anderson explained the processing of these multiple cryptos by commenting,

“Donation processing takes some time given the fact that we accept multiple coins and tokens, not just XRP. It takes a fair bit of testing different systems before implementing a new payment rail. But overall, it is not a problem.”

Anderson claims to provide periodical data, receipts, and pictures on his website, adding that distributed ledger technology [DLT] lies at the center of transparency as it registers all transaction records. This new means of donations appears to have fascinated many people as Ramon’s XRP fundraiser managed to raise twice the amount that was raised in fiat.

The gaps in traditional finance, be it a lack of transparency, centralization and time-consuming processes, can be solved through various cryptos and their technologies like Lightning Network, Ripple’s cross-border payments systems, World Wire, and others. Langston, while highlighting the problems with the financial system, said,

“There are so many things that are wrong with our current financial system and XRP is a way of bringing down the barriers to entry to 2 billion people who are unbanked, we are literally on the verge and are about to witness another technological revolution that will enable billions of people to start their own revolutions. Decentralized finance off the back of this too.”

Crypto-Twitter and other organizations

GoodSoulsGroup is just another in the list of charities accepting donations in crypto, with the likes of UNICEF now establishing a fund to receive, hold, and disburse donations in cryptocurrencies. The organization has opened donations in Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, and Litecoin, joining the likes of United Way, Save the Children, and The Water Project. Within the Crypto-community itself, Binance Charity Foundation has been actively participating in the field, with its head, Helen Hai, also the UNIDO Goodwill Ambassador.

Binance Charity Foundation [BCF] had started a one of its kind, Pink Care token initiative, to provide African girls with sanitary products with an aim to keep them from dropping out of school following the onset of menstruation. According to the Head of the BCF, donations in crypto were bundled in unique tokens and were redeemable for the menstrual products, changing the concept of period equity. According to its website, the initiative has received 16.71 BTC in donations [roughly $154,450.53].

Technology meet Adoption

Crypto-adoption has been the holy grail for all projects and products in the space. With the use case now extending to charities and donations, cryptocurrencies have found a new global application. However, the new path will require the entry of more cryptos over time to actually be a ‘level-paying’ field.