Donating crypto on EA Funds: more coins, low fees

By SamDeere @ 2021-11-22T17:02 (+75)

Effective Altruism Funds has recently implemented self-service cryptocurrency donations. This means that we now accept crypto donations of (almost) any size. If you’ve done well out of the recent crypto boom and you’d like to donate some of the proceeds, then EA Funds might be the easiest (and lowest-cost) place to donate crypto effectively.

To donate, just head to the regular EA Funds donation page, and then choose Donate with crypto on the payment page:

Some key features:

• Over 150 coins supported – … at least in the UK and Europe. US donors have a smaller number of available coins (just over 20) for legal reasons. Basically, we support all the spot markets offered on either FTX.com (non-US) or FTX.us (US), so our offering will keep expanding as FTX lists more assets.
• High-impact donation options – allocate your donation to any of the four EA Funds, or the ~40 non-profits supported on the platform
• By far the lowest fees of any crypto donation option we’ve seen – we’re liquidating directly through our exchange’s OTC desk, and don’t charge any additional processing fees, which means total fees are typically lower than 0.3% (as opposed to 1-5%+ that some other providers charge)
• Integrated with your EffectiveAltruism.org account – keep track of all your EA donations through our dashboard, and have donations auto-reported towards your Giving What We Can pledge
• Crypto donations large and small – donate as little as $10, or as much as you want (we’re happy to accept arbitrarily large donations, but for donations over $500,000 please get in touch with us first)
• Available worldwide, tax-deductible in the US, the UK, and NL

To our knowledge, there is no other crypto donation website that supports EA-aligned charities with such a low-cost and feature-rich offering.

EA Funds has significant experience with crypto – we started taking crypto during the 2017 crypto boom, and have since processed over $17 million in crypto donations. 

In many jurisdictions, donating appreciated cryptocurrency can be more tax-advantaged than liquidating the crypto yourself and then donating fiat currency, as you’ll generally avoid paying capital gains tax on an appreciated asset that has been donated.

Our previous process for taking crypto donations was fairly manual, so we restricted it to larger donors. Now, anyone donating more than the equivalent of 10 USD/EUR/GBP can make a donation (whether such a small donation is worth it will depend on the relevant network fee, which is paid by the donor). We can accept donations up to any size, but if you’d like to donate more than $500,000 equivalent (or more than $100,000 in a less-liquid altcoin) please get in touch with funds.crypto@effectivealtruism.org first.

If you’d like to donate a token that exists on multiple blockchains, we currently only support token donations using ERC20 (Ethereum Mainnet), so make sure you set your wallet or exchange transfer page accordingly.

More detail on donating crypto is available in the EA Funds help center.