Announcing EffectiveCrypto.org, powered by EA Funds

By SamDeere, Fabio Kuhn🔸 @ 2021-11-30T15:31 (+147)

We’re excited to announce the launch of EffectiveCrypto.org, a donation platform targeting members of the crypto community. The platform is a project of Effective Altruism Funds (and uses the same payments infrastructure), but is targeted towards people who have done well out of the recent crypto boom and haven’t yet engaged much with EA.

Check out EffectiveCrypto.org here

TL;DR: We’d love your help getting the word out, so we’ve listed some ways that you can get involved;  you can also read a bit more about our motivation for the project.

How you can help

We think that there’s a great opportunity here to engage the crypto community with effective altruism, and you can help us make EffectiveCrypto.org a success.

Promotion

If you have friends or contacts in the crypto community who you think might find EffectiveCrypto.org valuable, or you’re active in the crypto community, it’d be great if you could share the website. We think that there’s a huge amount of potential for engagement here, and you can make a big difference by helping us to get the word out.

Some things that would be really helpful:

• Tweeting about EffectiveCrypto.org. You could talk about why giving crypto effectively is personally motivating for you, or about the benefits of focusing on effectiveness. Any time is fine, but bonus points for tweeting this Thursday (Dec 2 2021). Here’s a sample tweet to get you started.
• Posting in relevant crypto Telegram groups/Discords/subreddits that you’re a member of, and who would be interested
• You can also follow us on Twitter
• Talking about it to EA-adjacent friends in the crypto community
• Dank memes??? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you’d like to take a more active role in helping us promote the site, or you have ideas for how we could promote this more widely/go viral, please comment below, or email crypto@effectivealtruism.org.

Feedback

EffectiveCrypto.org is an experiment. We built it quickly to test out the hypothesis that there’s a market for a crypto-focused website that encourages people to donate effectively. However, this means that there’s probably a lot we could do to improve the site in terms of the information we present, the design, and the overall user experience.

If you’re someone in our target audience (or you feel like you can get in the right mindset), please feel free to comment below, or email crypto@effectivealtruism.org with any suggestions.

Motivation and Goals

At the moment, many cryptocurrencies are at all-time high prices, and many people who hold crypto are looking to donate some of their holdings. Donating appreciated crypto directly is often more tax-advantaged than converting the crypto into a fiat currency first, because doing so avoids capital gains tax in many jurisdictions.

There is already a fair amount of overlap between the crypto community and EA (cf. Sam Bankman-Fried/FTX, Lantern Ventures, etc.), and it seems like the quantitative mindset that many EAs exhibit is also a trait found in many crypto early adopters. We think that a lot of people who hold crypto would probably be interested in donating effectively. However, there aren’t currently many places that are trying to build this bridge explicitly. There are many websites aimed at making it easy to donate crypto (e.g. The Giving Block, Endaoment etc), but typically give a huge range of donation options, with no particular focus on effectiveness. EffectiveCrypto.org makes it easy to give crypto, but aims to showcase a smaller number of donation options that are informed by the principles of effective altruism (basically, the funds and non-profits supported by EA Funds).

Our two main goals for the project are:

• Increase overall counterfactual donations to effective charities, by making it quick and easy for people to make effective donations using crypto (who might otherwise have defaulted to less-effective options).
• Introduce members of the crypto community to effective altruism, by providing engaging information that piques users’ interest, and allows people to ‘fall down the EA rabbithole’ if they want to.

To make it easier, we’ve grouped some selected charities (and some of the EA Funds) into ‘bundles’ that cover a specific cause area. We’ve chosen causes and charities that we think people without too much background in EA would find appealing, and to avoid decision fatigue associated with choosing between the ~40 charities supported by EA Funds (although we do provide donors with the option to ‘build their own bundle’, and choose from the full set of charities).