FORTUNE Magazine entered into the cryptocurrency space with a bang.
In early August, the magazine teamed up with Pplpleasr to create a series of NFTs.
Needless to say, the NFTs were a hit.
Everyone loved them. Buoyed by their success, Pplpleasr and FORTUNE teamed up with California Public Benefit corporation Endaoment to launch a fund for journalists.
Here’s the kicker: Endaoment’s infrastructure allows donors to donate in crypto and remain tax-exempt. Endaoment is tax-exempt under Internal Revenue code 501 (c) (3).
About the Fund
The FORTUNE Journalism Pplpleasr fund was started with a view to aiding journalists and media organizations to adhere to the rules of the profession.
It was also founded to promote integrity and aid journalists who are in need of assistance globally.
The fund was originally seeded with $165,000 USD and further donations are expected to come in from other sources.
There are Benefits to Promoting Journalistic Integrity
As with anything that has to do with the cryptocurrency space, journalistic integrity needed encouragement within the web3 space.
We are dealing with assets that are basically code in this space. This code is valued by people who determine the prices of such assets.
Media organizations are known to drive digital asset prices in different directions as mankind still wonders how to react to the space.
As such, the media practitioners aside from the developers and project creators are the single most powerful group of people within the cryptocurrency space.
One wrong article or gesture from a media professional with the right amount of followers can send a token price down to zero.
Similar effects are observed in any other industry on earth.
The media is literally seen as the fourth arm of government. Anything the media decides is as good as done.
The fund aims to encourage best practices within and outside the space.
Allowing people to vote using both PayPal and Ethereum shines the spotlight on what non-profits of the future could look like.
We reached out to Robert (Robbie) Heeger, the CEO of Endaoment for more information about this.
Here is what he had to say.
Robert (Robbie) Heeger CEO of Endaoment
E-Crypto News:
What role did Endaoment play in the creation of the FORTUNE Pplpleasr Fund?
“We facilitated the ETH donation from NFT artist Pplpleasr to Fortune! With the Endaoment infrastructure, Pplpleasr was able to directly donate ETH and have it delivered as US dollars to recipient organizations.”
If Pplpleasr had made the donation using different means or by removing funds from the blockchain first would likely have yielded an unfavorable tax situation for her.
The Endaoment staff worked closely alongside the FORTUNE staff in order to help determine suitable candidates for inclusion in this fund.
Between on-chain infrastructure and non-profit experience, Endaoment was able to steward these funds in a way that created positive outcomes for both the donor as well as the grant recipients.
E-Crypto News:
Please, can you take us under the hood and describe how the fund’s blockchain activities work?
Of course! First, the donor (in this case, pplpleasr) sent their ETH to us, representing an irrevocable charitable donation.
From there, we exchanged the ETH to USDC stablecoins before depositing into the FORTUNE PplpleasrFund smart contract.
After funds were deposited, grant recommendations were created on-chain to each of the recipient organizations, all of which received notice of the grant awards.
After each organization accepted the grant awards and due diligence was completed, USDC funds were sent to Circle Financial where tokens were burned and Circle sent an equivalent amount of US dollars to the recipient organizations via ABA bank wire.
Funds were all delivered within 24 hours of the initial ETH donation from pplpleasr.
E-Crypto News:
How can the issue of the high transaction fees on the Ethereum Blockchain be mitigated with Endaoment’s infrastructure?
While we do our best to handle things in an efficient manner by keeping all transactions and blockchain interactions as light as possible, the way that high transaction fees will be mitigated is through the Ethereum Blockchain’s coming upgrade to proof of stake (see: “The Merge”).
Related: E-Crypto New’s Ethereum Roundtable Interview…The Future of Ethereum
E-Crypto News:
How can nonprofits deploy on Endaoment’s infrastructure?
Nonprofits (qualified 501(c)(3)s) can “deploy” on Endaoment’s infrastructure simply by navigating to their organization’s page (app.endaoment.org/orgs/{
OrgEIN}) and clicking “submit a claim”. By filling out the corresponding form, organizations are able to let us know how they’d like to receive granted funds, after which point they can encourage cryptocurrency giving to their organization via Endaoment.
E-Crypto News:
What are the benefits of deploying nonprofit operations on blockchains and their allied technologies?
A couple of items worth mentioning here!
Deployment on blockchain and general exposure to cryptocurrency donations open nonprofits up to a ballooning asset class that has a market cap of >$2 trillion.
Additionally, because all blockchain transactions are public, the process of how donations and grants are managed and delivered is exceptionally transparent.
Distribution via Endaoment on the Ethereum blockchain is also significantly faster than working through a DAF held at a traditional outlet.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Endaoment has much higher throughput than traditional DAF providers as we have industry-leading low fees organized around our philanthropic mission. While most DAF providers collect 2-4.5% fees on AUM every year, incentivizing themselves to make it easy to donate into a DAF but hard to grant out of a DAF, we have a lifetime fee of 1.5%, regardless of how long funds stay in your DAF. We take 0.5% on all donations into DAFs and 1.0% on all grants made out of DAFs, which directly incentives Endaoment to make it as easy as possible for folks to make grants out of their DAFs to qualified non profit organizations.
E-Crypto News:
What’s the next move for Endaoment ahead of Christmas of 2021?
We are actually in the midst of a product overhaul and redesign that will not only look awesome but also provide donors with more robust information about the non-profits they can support through the use of their Endaoment DAF.
E-Crypto News:
Are there any plans to have multiple blockchain interoperability on Endaoment’s infrastructure? Please, can you tell us more about this?
Not in the immediate future. We currently work on other blockchains by accepting over the counter gifts like Bitcoin, Filecoin, Dogecoin, etc. and manually liquidating and moving assets over to the Ethereum blockchain to be deposited in the donor’s DAF.
