Argentine Freemasons want to put NFTs to philanthropic work

September 6, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Argentina

The Argentine Masonic Grand Lodge is the first freemason affiliation to utilize Web3 technology in a philanthropic NFT collection.

The Argentine Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons is jumping into nonfungible tokens (NFTs), but with a philanthropic twist. The secretive society is releasing 77 digital art NFTs under the name CryptoMasons, with profits going back to local charities supported by the chapter.

According to the announcement, it is the first official NFT project supported by a local Grand Lodge. A Masonic Grand Lodge is the governing entity of a given fraternal freemasons group in a specific region. While this project comes from an Argentinian branch, there are hundreds in existence around the globe.

The collection contains esoteric images related to masonry history and lore, such as black and white checkered floors and the infamous square and compass symbol. Even the specific number of 77 NFTs available correlates to a numeric significance within occultist traditions and spirituality.

Nuevo adelato!

New sneak peak!

"Cuando te busco, no estás
Cuando te encuentro, te vas"

¿⬆️⬇️? pic.twitter.com/B7LjQwqlP9
— CryptoMasons (@CryptoMasonsGLA) May 23, 2022

Behind this collection are the Lodge’s philanthropic intentions, which gives part of the funds back to local charities. The website for the collection claims the organization is using this collection in part to “raise philanthropy to a new and unprecedented scale in the history of the institution."

This is yet another NFT collection using the combination of Web3 technology and utility for philanthropy. Digital assets are being used from things like raising funds for victims of conflict in Ukraine to micro-donations patronage for classical music.

CryptoMason NFTs are going towards a local orphanage, professional development center for youth and an immigration rights center in Argentina.

Hoy, les presentamos otra iniciativa filantrópica con la que vas a colaborar cada vez que compres un NFT de @CryptoMasonsGLA

⛓️El centro de Formación Laboral "Angel Cassanello"
Ubicado en Santa Fe
‍♀️Forma jóvenes en diferentes oficios

Conocé más: https://t.co/a0lKNEiHLX pic.twitter.com/5UI5TZVya4
— CryptoMasons (@CryptoMasonsGLA) May 31, 2022

This development out of Argentina comes as the country continues its crypto adoption. On Aug. 24 the country’s Mendoza province began accepting crypto for taxes and administrative fees. A month prior Binance and Mastercard announced a launch of prepaid crypto cards in Argentina.

According to survey data from Triple-A, around 5.18% of Argentina’s population own a type of cryptocurrency, which is over 2.4 million people.

NFT micro-philanthropy gives a new voice to the opera

September 1, 2022 Coin Telegraph

Coin Telegraph

An opera-centric DAO is using NFTs to open up new funding avenues to classical musicians outside of the limiting legacy institutions.

The music industry has been a major adopter of Web3 integration, with use cases ranging from song rights, blockchain-based streaming and new forms of digital releases.

Genres like pop, EDM and hip hop have represented nonfungible tokens (NFTs) in the music industry so far. However, classical music, and specifically opera, just found its entrance.

Living Opera, a Web3 community that combines classical music with blockchain innovation, is turning to the emerging technology to give a new voice to the prestigious art and the artists who perform it.

Soula Parassidis, CEO of Living Opera, told Cointelegraph in an interview that the premiere Magic Mozart NFT collection is a way of introducing the innovative world of fintech to the traditional one of classical music and vice versa.

“We wanted it to be easy to understand, low risk, and a way for people to feel comfortable.”

Parassidis explains that these NFTs pay tribute to the concept of the “musikalisches würfelspiele,” a dice game to randomly generate music from precomposed options. This is one of the earliest examples of generative art and is allegedly attributed to Mozart.

Musicians have used NFTs for extra revenues and fan incentives, like Grimes’ $5.8 million digital asset project. For classical music, this could mean a completely new life and a step into relevancy for the next generation.

A survey from the National Endowment for the Arts found that the percentage of adults in the United States who attend at least one opera a year dropped from an already low 3.2% in 2002 to 2.2% in 2017.

The pandemic escalated this by shuttering classical venues and opera houses all over the world. One of the world’s premiere opera houses, the Metropolitan Opera, reported that in July 2021 it was down $25 million in revenue from the previous year.

Christos Makridis, COO of Living Opera, told Cointelegraph that NFTs open a new way for classical artists and opera singers to bypass the traditional proposal process for grants and endowments.

“Blockchain-based digital assets remove traditional barriers, the proposals, artist grants, etc. so that artists can connect directly with philanthropists and remove a lot of that administrative expenses.”

Makridis says that NFTs give artists in this genre access to “short-term liquidity” that never existed before.

Some classical artists have dabbled in personal NFTs, such as New Zealand composer Matthew Thomas Soong or American composer poser Cristina Spinei.

In 2021 the Dallas Symphony Orchestra was one of the earliest pioneers of classical music NFTs. The orchestra released an NFT as a fundraiser for musicians affected by the Met Opera’s pandemic-related paycheck suspension.

The DAO-like structure of Living Opera opens up micro-philanthropy for artists involved and their projects. Parassidis highlighted the rarity of such innovation in a very traditional industry and called NFTs a catalyst for socio-cultural change.

“They can be used as a mechanism to draw attention to voices, art forms, causes that really need more visibility.”

Both Parassidis and Makridis say this technology can help excite young people to engage with the art form and allow long-term fans new engagement possibilities.

Coinbase Giving: Half Year in Review

December 23, 2021 Coinbase

coinbase

In May 2021, we announced the launch of Coinbase Giving. Coinbase Giving is the operational embodiment of our commitment to Pledge 1%: our promise to dedicate 1% of Coinbase profits, equity, and employee time toward charitable activities that leverage the power of crypto to increase economic freedom in the world.

Where we are

In the past 7 months we’re proud of what we’ve accomplished:

Coinbase Giving is the largest charitable organization focused on Crypto (>$500M endowed at the time of post)
GiveCrypto, founded in 2018, has been brought officially under the umbrella of Coinbase Giving to enable scale and maximize social impact
We have launched 7 programs, supported 410 organizations, deployed ~$2M, and are impacting 2K+ lives

We are only at the beginning of this journey. 2021 has been a test and iteration year — our impact is still modest. The purpose of this post is to share progress and lessons learned.

Progress

In 2021 our focus has been to support endeavors that align to three broad categories:

Increasing education around, and access to, crypto
Accelerating the development of crypto protocols that underpin the cryptoeconomy
Fostering the next generation of crypto talent, no matter where they are located

Highlights

GiveCrypto is our nonprofit that enables crypto based direct giving to some of the most needy people in the world. In doing so we also educate them about crypto and give them an alternative to their broken financial systems.

GiveCrypto has been one of Coinbase Giving’s largest investment areas in-house. GiveCrypto is a two-sided market. First, donations are driven by donors who are inspired to give charitably. Second, from these donations, crypto is put directly in the hands of people in need through our on-the-ground Ambassador program.

Bringing GiveCrypto directly within Coinbase has accelerated our ability to integrate donation collection within the consumer experience. As such, 2021 has been a critical year of rebuilding and integration. As the #1 crypto exchange in the US, we see this connection as a huge step forward in enabling public donations using crypto and Coinbase products. We have taken this chance to revamp our Ambassador program — our system to distribute funds directly into the hands of the most needy. In 2021, we were purely testing our distribution system and only reached 246 recipients. However, with those tests now under our belts, we feel ready to scale distributions dramatically in 2022.

Already we are seeing how crypto possesses unique characteristics that make it suitable as a cross-border donations mechanism. For example, it allows donors to avoid disintermediation by bad actors, who often take a cut at the expense of the recipient. Crypto adoption is growing, particularly in Latin American countries where hyperinflation can be devastating. Our independently validated randomized control test shows that direct giving continues to demonstrate high real-life impact, whether in enabling individuals to pay for food, education, or other day-to-day needs.

Developer Grants 2.0 to accelerate the development of crypto protocols.

In August, we launched the second iteration of our Crypto Community Fund whose goal is to make the cryptoeconomy safer and easier to access for everyone. We selected 6 developers to fund across 3 thematic areas: (1) Scalability; (2) Privacy, identity and zero knowledge research; and (3) Protocol security and other foundational infrastructure.

Grant terms are typically 1-year and we will share progress on their journeys throughout 2022.

Base 11 partnership to foster the next generation of global and diverse crypto talent.

Earlier this year Coinbase announced our three-year partnership with Base 11. Together, our goal is to develop the next generation of diverse crypto talent. In early October, Base11 hosted the Next Frontier Conference & Expo, which featured a fireside chat with Alesia Haas, CFO at Coinbase and Landon Taylor, Founder & Chairman, Base 11.

At the conclusion of the conference, the Coinbase Giving team launched our first ever Open Innovation Challenge, giving away over $10,000 in prizes and an exclusive NFT. The Open Innovation Challenge called for participants to focus on four key pillars: environmental sustainability, healthcare, education, and financial inclusion. The call to action has drawn hundreds of participants from all over the world and dozens of quality submissions that address the key pillars described above. We’re excited to enter the judging phase and will announce the winner in Q1 2022.

Learnings

The crypto-forward charitable ecosystem — like the crypto ecosystem — is still nascent. That said, there are a growing number of novel partnerships between established non-profits (who deeply understand the social sector) and technical partners (who get crypto/blockchain) trying to better solve old problems with new solutions. We’ve learned this is Coinbase Giving’s sweet spot for grant-making.
As more people hold crypto, more people want to give in crypto. “45% of crypto holders donated $1,000 or more to charities in 2020 compared to 33% of all investors”, according to a new report by Fidelity. We have engaged in many conversations with potential partners exploring the role Coinbase Giving could play in connecting nonprofits and endowments with the infrastructure they need to accept and hold crypto as an endowment (only ~2% have the ability to do so currently).
Without education, there is no access. As the crypto market has heated up in 2021, so has the call for Coinbase Giving to provide more educational resources and support. Non-profits, NGOs and education leaders increasingly see crypto literacy as a next-generation skill required for the future success of their communities and constituencies. Coinbase’s investment in Crypto Learn and other initiatives distinctly well position Coinbase Giving to address this educational need. We look forward to exploring more in 2022.
Accelerating and building infrastructure is more than open source code. There are many barriers to the simple and secure use of crypto and blockchain that are just as much about infrastructure development as having the right protocols. There are also many more applications for blockchain to solve social problems than have yet been envisioned or realized. This is all infrastructure. We can do better to support a flourishing ecosystem.

Next Up

With 2021 as a foundation-building (half) year, we are looking forward to incorporating what we’ve learned and to drive the social impact of crypto in 2022. We’ll keep the community up to date on what’s happening with a quarterly blog. Stay tuned!

Coinbase Giving: Half Year in Review was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

GiveCrypto Q3 Update

October 21, 2021 Coinbase

By Joe Waltman, Group Product Manager, GiveCrypto.org

Hope everyone had a wonderful summer. GiveCrypto just concluded its first full quarter as a part of Coinbase, so we wanted to share an update with those who are following our progress. As always, we’d love to hear from you.

Coinbase Integrations

As mentioned in previous updates, we’ve been experimenting with ways to make it as easy as possible for Coinbase users to donate to charity. Coinbase has over 68 million verified users, many of whom transact significant sums of crypto on a regular basis. We see a golden opportunity to facilitate charitable donations inside this ecosystem.

*Example of the previous, multi-step flow required to donate in the Coinbase app*

We have tried to integrate a donation function into Coinbase’s UI before, but we limited those past attempts to banners on Coinbase’s web and mobile properties. Those banners didn’t drive much traffic, and when they did, the user would have to go through a multi-step flow to donate. Because of that, donation volume has been relatively low.

Though these modest attempts weren’t the most effective, we chose to take this cautious approach for good reason: We wanted to be sure that we didn’t confuse users or impact Coinbase conversion rates. We also wanted to minimize the technical complexity of integrating a more prominent donation function until we and Coinbase were fully ready to do so.

We now understand that the real opportunity lies in integrating donation options into primary transactional flows like buy and sell. From integrating back-end services to solving a variety of other technical challenges, we know this won’t be simple. But finding a way for Coinbase users to seamlessly donate crypto would be a big accomplishment — not just for us, but also for the crypto community.

*Mock-up of a donate one percent integration in the sell flow*

The current plan is to experiment with a ‘donate one percent of your transaction’ mechanic within Coinbase’s “sell” flow. At first, only a small percentage of Coinbase users will be exposed to this experiment as we observe how they impact key guardrail metrics. We’ll then analyze those results to determine our path forward.

As an aside, I’d like to take this opportunity to express how exciting it is to be involved in the innovation we’re witnessing in this industry. We have long believed that Coinbase has the potential to become a leader in the world of philanthropy, and our experience working together has only reinforced that belief. Perhaps one day we’ll be able to promote the verb “give” to a first-class citizen, so to speak, equal to the likes of “buy” and “sell.”

Ambassador Program

Before we give an update on the current status of the ambassador program, it probably makes sense to review the program’s history.

We launched the ambassador program in 2019 and spent the first half of 2020 implementing an RCT in Venezuela. We spent the second half of 2020 experimenting with a crypto donation marketplace that would be similar to GoFundMe or DonorsChoose but fully crypto-based. Ultimately, this didn’t accomplish what we hoped it would, so we decided to pivot back to the ambassador program in early 2021.

Our goal for 2021 was to automate as much of the program as possible so that it could be scaled in the near future. To minimize the manual workload, we started out by automating most of the program’s operational components, but we only invited people we felt we could trust. Giving away money on the internet tends to attract scammers, and we needed some assurances that people would use our funds in good faith.

We quickly learned that it would be hard to recruit ambassadors at scale if we only acquired them through high-trust channels such as labor marketplaces and social media networks. Once we realized that we would need to cast a wider net, we launched a version of the ambassador program that allows anybody to apply.

Before launching this updated version of the ambassador program, we developed fraud detection metrics designed to mitigate Sybil attacks. In simple terms, this helped us ensure that the ambassadors who applied to the program were who they said they were.

In the same update, we also tried to devise a trust score, which is a way of programmatically identifying which ambassadors are acting in good faith. We defined a good-faith ambassador as one who meets two criteria: they select recipients who are actually in need; and their recipients actually do what they say they’ll do with the funds.

Once we recruited a few hundred ambassadors, we found we needed to augment the automated scoring with significant manual investigation and intervention to thwart bad-faith behavior. We’ve thus realized that until our automations have undergone further maturation and validation, we’ll need to filter down the incoming audience.

For these reasons, we have decided to make the following changes:

Focus on the following countries: Venezuela, Colombia and El Salvador
Hire a manager in each country, whose primary job is to recruit trusted ambassadors. We will closely monitor these ambassadors and use the data to inform our automation process.
Monitor the activities of each ambassador’s recipients. We plan to give “good” ambassadors more invites and to extend the length of payment periods for “good”’ recipients.
Begin measuring the impact of donations via self-reported questionnaires and spot checks, which will be overseen by the local manager as well as high-quality ambassadors.

This revised approach will provide the following benefits.

Provide locations with different characteristics (i.e. inflation, crypto adoption, smartphone penetration and regulatory acceptance) but still have high levels of need and minimal logistical challenges (i.e. timezone and localization)
Reduce our team’s need to manually supervise the program
Improve the ratio of high-quality ambassadors signing up
Allow us to facilitate redemption options for recipients, such as stores and cash-out partners
Train and validate our data models on what good behavior looks like across various geographies

We have already started rolling out components of this plan and look forward to more enhancements in Q4. Between this program’s growth and the new donation options, we’re thrilled to see our work paying off.

GiveCrypto Q3 Update was originally published in The Coinbase Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Anonymous Dogecoin Holder Donates Profits to a Dog Shelter in Florida

April 22, 2021 Bitcoin.com

Philanthropy