Giving Compass' Take:
- Charities Aid Foundation explores the potential of blockchain technology in relation to philanthropy, specifically with the potential for creating decentralized charities.
- Blockchain has already disrupted the nonprofit world a bit when it comes to transactions — would funders be willing to take things a step further? How exactly would so-called Distributed Autonomous Organizations work?
- Learn how blockchain can be used to solve social problems.
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When it comes to the potential impact of blockchain technology on philanthropy and civil society, the focus has so far been largely on three areas:
- Reduction of transaction costs through disintermediation (e.g. Disberse)
- Automating processes through the use of smart contracts (e.g. Alice.si)
- Boosting transparency through asset tracking (E.g. both of the above, plus the BitGive Foundation’s GiveTrack)
But it struck me recently that where there has been less focus up to this point is on the broader question of decentralization, and what this might mean for civil society. We flirted with this issue in our paper Block and Tackle, where we looked at the possibility of creating charitable entities on the blockchain; whether these could be structured as Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAOs); and what the implications might be for charity regulation.
However, developments such as the emergence of a new wave of DAOs following the hack of the original DAO last year, the creation of blockchain prediction markets such as Augur and Gnosis, and the massive rise in the number of Initial Coin Offerings in place of traditional IPOs have led me to think that we didn’t develop these ideas far enough.
Read the full article about blockchain DAOs and the future of charities by Rhodri Davies at Charities Aid Foundation.