With all due respect to its detractors, Bitcoin (BTC) is increasingly used for a good cause. By accepting donations in cryptocurrency since early January, a hospital in the United States has already received the equivalent of $ 800,000 in Bitcoin Capital from a generous donor. This trend is a real boon for organizations that depend on donations from the public.
Hospital accepts Bitcoin donations, and it’s a success
In the United States, local media Boston Globe reports that a hospital received the equivalent of $ 800,000 in donated bitcoins (BTC) in less than a month. Located in the state of Massachusetts, the hospital known as Cape Cod Healthcare decided to accept cryptocurrency donations last January, when an anonymous asked the team if bitcoin donations were accepted.
With the email coming from a generous donor for several years, the hospital team quickly worked on setting up a solution to accept future BTC donations. Once the structure was operational, the donor donated his $ 800,000, through two transactions.
According to Christopher Lawson, director of development for Cape Cod Healthcare, the hospital had to first obtain approval from its legal and financial departments. An idea that was quickly accepted by the team for several reasons:
“Cape Cod Healthcare has discovered that the tax department has a process in place for cryptocurrency transactions, including those made as donations. By donating BTC to charity, the donor does not need to report their gains or losses to the IRS, ”Lawson said.
Obviously, the hospital specifies that donations in BTC are immediately converted into US dollars upon receipt. Moreover, if other donors request it, the hospital says it is ready to accept other cryptocurrencies and to expand the possibilities of donations.
This is a real opportunity for the organization , which is going through a particularly difficult period since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic:
“We are coming out of a time when donations were hard to come by for a lot of people. It lets people know that we have the capacity to accept donations in cryptocurrency, and that we have the infrastructure in place, ”Lawson added.
In the near future, Christopher Lawson believes that more nonprofits, such as universities and museums, will explore the possibility of accepting donations in cryptocurrency .
A trend in cryptocurrency donations that is confirmed
It is a fact, Bitcoin (BTC) is more and more used to serve a good cause and more particularly through donations, on which many organizations depend entirely. No offense to those trying to demean the utility of Bitcoin, the queen of cryptocurrencies is also a prime vector for charity.
This trend has already been developing for a few years, and should continue in this direction in the future. The Cape Cod Healthcare initiative also allows Bitcoin to gain a certain visibility with charitable organizations .
At the same time, cryptocurrency exchange platforms like Binance and FTX are greatly fueling this trend . Binance has in particular an entity dedicated to charity, called Binance Charity. Since its creation, Binance has already raised $ 78 million at the time of this writing; funds that the platform allocates to the fight against Covid-19 and other campaigns.
On the FTX side, the platform has pledged to donate 1% of its profits to charities through a new foundation . The funds raised by this new foundation will be redistributed according to the wishes of the users of the platform, who will have a right to vote on the choice of beneficiary associations.