Robbie Heeger’s Endaoment has facilitated the donation of over $30 million of cryptocurrency to 243 totally different charities. These donations come from altruistic cryptocurrency buyers who’re additionally partly motivated by lowering their tax burdens to Uncle Sam and retaining extra of their income.
Born in Silicon Valley, Heeger, now in his early 30’s, was uncovered to entrepreneurship from a younger age. Though he initially labored in massive tech, he quickly grew to become so enthralled with blockchain that he dropped every thing to pursue his new ardour in 2018. This led him to create Endaoment, which he calls the primary regulatory-compliant nonprofit constructed solely on the Ethereum blockchain. The mission permits anybody to donate one in all over 150 cryptocurrencies to a charity of their selection and, in doing so, scale back their tax liabilities.
Endaoment represents the most recent technology of blockchain giving — however it isn’t the primary. In 2017, a mysterious determine calling themselves Pine anonymously donated 5057 Bitcoin, value $55 million on the time, to a group of over 60 charities.
These donations not solely inspired main charities to just accept cryptocurrency contributions for the primary time but additionally served to counteract the notion of Bitcoin being primarily utilized in dishonest or felony actions. While the Pineapple Fund helped legitimize cryptocurrency as a medium of charity, it was on no account the primary. As early as 2011, Bruno Kučinskasin created Bitcoin 100, an initiative to donate Bitcoin to charities that will overtly settle for BTC.
Despite many charities‘ early exposure to cryptocurrency, few have continued to receive substantial donations on the blockchain and many even removed such donation options from their websites. The reason was simple on one level and yet complex by nature — taxes.
Heeger has worked out how to make more money and make the world a better place too.
Endaoment
Upon graduating from university in 2012, Heeger accepted a full-time position with Apple where he first worked as a content publishing quality assurance engineer before becoming a manager of production operations. As his career progressed, his fascination with blockchain technology grew and in 2018, he “left Apple with this understanding that crypto was not just something that I could be tangentially interested in anymore — it was consuming.” Despite his experience at a major tech company, he saw himself as technically weak and took boot camp-style classes in solidity coding and blockchain web development.
“I started brainstorming ways that I could take this new skill set and try and build something that would funnel crypto capital into non-profit organizations that otherwise would have had very little exposure to crypto,” Heeger recounts of his early days. One of his initial ideas was to create a “media chain” by which to verify news content and make it resistant to censorship.
The brainstorming paid off, as he recalled how he had made it a habit to give away a portion of his Apple stock to a donor-advised fund each year because he “had stock that had tax obligations on it and I wanted to give that stock away without having to sell it first.” Charity can, of course, be more than simply selfless giving, as strategic donations can often allow for both individuals and businesses to reduce their tax burdens. While selling AAPL stock before donating it would have incurred additional capital gains taxes, giving the stock to a donor-advised fund allowed him to receive tax benefits for the entire value of the stock without incurring capital gains taxes, as charitable donor-advised funds are not liable to tax.
“I had crypto that had appreciated significantly and I didn‘t want to sell it first in order to donate it. I thought ‘wouldn‘t it be cool if there was a donor-advised fund that took crypto’ and that was the seed that grew to become Endaoment.”
Heeger, now in his early 30’s, based Endaoment in March 2019. Its core operate is to offer a tax receipt in change for a donation of cryptocurrency. As a donor-advised fund, these making donations obtain “advisory privileges” which signifies that they’ll counsel the place they want the proceeds of their cryptocurrency to be donated. In follow, which means that 99% of the time, funds go to the donor’s desired U.S. charity of which Heeger says there are about 2.5 million. The 1% of instances when the funds don’t attain the donor’s first selection of vacation spot embrace conditions the place the grant advice “is to a hate group or a company that‘s not in good standing with the Internal Revenue Service, or one that presents some conflict of interest for the organization,” Heeger explains.
“Give us your crypto and we will give you a tax receipt that says you donated it to a 501C3 tax-exempt non-profit public benefit corporation called Endaoment,” he clarifies regarding the business model.
Thank you for the bids on Grifter #659. One of three rats in the collection and without doubt the most pretty.
All proceeds will go to the Grifter Fund in collaboration with @endaomentdotorg 🙏
Check out all the auctions: https://t.co/hpSUANo3Dl pic.twitter.com/OJ5Ktei1QB
— XCOPY 🏴 (@XCOPYART) December 23, 2021
Here’s the way it works in numbers
Suppose Fred purchased 1000 ETH at $3 for $3,000. At $3,000 per ETH, he now has $3 million value. Presuming a 33.33% capital positive factors tax, he would owe the federal government about $1 million upon sale, being left with $2 million for himself. Alternatively, he might select to donate 250 ETH to Endaoment, which might concern him a tax receipt for the equal of the $750,000 donation — which might rely in opposition to and totally cancel out his $750,000 tax legal responsibility when promoting the remaining 750 ETH, which means he could be left with $2.25 million, with $750,000 despatched to the charity of his selection and 0 going to the IRS.
The speak of the IRS reveals a bottleneck: In order to take care of its standing as a U.S. tax-exempt public curiosity company, Endaoment can solely concern grants to 501C3 charities registered with U.S. authorities. This signifies that whereas many native charities exterior the U.S. wouldn’t be legitimate recipients of donations, numerous worldwide causes can nonetheless be focused as most of the charities act globally.
Endaoment gives ready-made suggested funds that anybody can donate to. Source: Endaoment
“We‘ve done a lot of work in Sub-Saharan Africa and Afghan refugee relief, and donations to organizations that do work in Europe and all over the world that just have US 501C3 entities that they use as fundraising vehicles for donors in the U.S.,” Heeger clarifies.
Though Heeger notes that he “cannot solicit services to people outside of the U.S.,” people outside the United States have used the Endaoment software to make crypto donations for which they receive U.S. tax receipts just as any American would. Success in getting tax deductions in such international cases is far from guaranteed, and Heeger notes that not all countries issue tax deductions on the basis of charitable giving. Many users have asked about the possibility of creating tax receipts that meet the requirements of various governments, as the tax systems of many countries consider self-directed donations as societally desirable and therefore encourage them by granting tax reductions based on registered donations.
“We‘ve seen people in Japan, in Australia, in the U.K. and in France come and use the site in order to effect impact — They have taken on the burden of figuring out how they prove the deductibility with their local regulators themselves.”
Heeger sees many opportunities for future expansion including to charities in other countries which he believes would upgrade the number of options from 2.5 to over 7 million charitable organizations. It is clear that his mind has never left Silicon Valley, as he characterizes the project as a “minimum viable product that supports straightforward crypto giving of any crypto asset to any U.S. nonprofit as dollars.”
The Endaoment model is fairly simple, for now. Source: Endaoment
Born in Silicon Valley
Heeger grew up in California’s Palo Alto within the early 2000s, which he describes as an intense and extremely aggressive surroundings the place numerous dad and mom of his classmates would “show up on keynotes for the iPhone or some Google service.” The setting made for an surroundings with a number of entry to and encouragement to make use of and experiment with new applied sciences, with tech corporations usually utilizing the faculties he went to as testing grounds for brand spanking new merchandise.
Driven by a ardour for storytelling, in 2008, Heeger started research in broadcast and digital journalism on the University of Southern California. He specialised in publishing know-how, impressed by what he noticed as a “disruption of the legacy media institutions by the internet” inflicting a change in the best way folks received info. He additionally grew thinking about ethics comparable to the necessity to stability profitability and the journalistic obligation of trustworthy reporting. Soon, he discovered himself working iTunes’ social media channels as an Apple intern.
“I really loved the triangle of business, technology and ethics, and having to try and find balance between those three key drivers — journalism had that in spades.”
Throughout his research, he labored for the campus TV information station, the place he ultimately oversaw 25 reporters and different employees as a multimedia director. In 2010, Heeger had “a real eye-opener” when he traveled to Tanzania to volunteer as an English trainer at a rural city on the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro by a company referred to as Cross-Cultural Solutions. Though he regarded for instructing strategies that will assist the kids gear up for his or her future in a aggressive world, he noticed that offering a Palo Alto-style schooling was a “problem if you‘re trying to do work in a space that‘s chronically underfunded.”
2021 was a breakout year for @endaomentdotorg, from major gifts 💰, to #NFT powered #philanthropy 🖼, to fiscal sponsorships 📜 and beyond! 🚀
Learn about the community behind nearly $30 million in #CryptoPhilanthropy in our full Annual Impact Report: https://t.co/OYAKGgFc3v pic.twitter.com/rd8OD3Nxuk
— endaoment.eth 👉 ETHDenver (@endaomentdotorg) January 19, 2022
Anonymous donors
One case in which Endaoment is unable to issue tax receipts is when the donor is fully anonymous. Though anonymous donations can be accepted and Heeger notes that many “religions will say that the anonymous giver is the most righteous kind of giver because they don‘t expect anything in return,” only a very small percentage of donors fit that category.
Heeger explains that there are various degrees of anonymity when it comes to donating such as whether the donor wants to be unknown to only the receiving charity or to Endaoment as well. When sending crypto from an address with an ENS name, for example, it may be easy for anyone tracking transactions to deduce who the donor is, though the receiving charity itself will not see such information. If funds are routed directly from an exchange, Heeger says that not even Endaoment has any way to figure out the identity of the donor. In such cases, he often checks with the organization to ensure that they are comfortable receiving anonymous money.
In one example of semi-anonymous giving, the developers of SushiSwap donated $1 million SUSHI, with each donation being labeled as being from the SushiSwap core developers rather than from any particular individual.
Journey to DAO
In the future, he says Endaoment will support complex investment strategies and international giving. These strategies would include the gauntlet of crypto-assets like NFT’s, vote-locked tokens and interest-bearing tokens. “You should be able to give whatever it is that you want to give and direct those proceeds to an issue that you care about,” he emphasizes.
What Endaoment shouldn’t be but, regardless of the title, is a DAO. That is supposed to vary quickly, nevertheless, as Heeger’s plan is that “people who are actively advancing the mission of Endoament are rewarded with tokens that give them membership, interest and oversight power over the nonprofit entity itself.” This would make EnDAOment a decentralized autonomous group, which comes with the Web3 dream of leveraging a neighborhood to make occur what no small centralized group might ever do.
Soon, Heeger imagines that it will likely be simple for anybody to change into the subsequent Pine, even on a a lot smaller price range, and create a fund by which they and others use to distribute their crypto wealth to charities around the globe.
“We want to democratize those philontrophic tools and make them as easy as interacting with a DeFi Protocol or as easy as transacting using MetaMask.”
