GiveTron: Charitable Crypto Donations and NFT Impact Certification on Tron

[EvanCFCE]

Project Name: GiveTron: Impactful Blockchain Architecture for Nonprofits and Charitable Foundations on Tron

Project Track: DeFi

Team Name: Center for Collaborative Economics (www.cfce.io)

Team Member(s):
Evan Hudson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/evan-hudson-479388255/
Julian Kingman: LinkedIn/
Github: JulianKingman · GitHub
George (KuyawaKata): kuyawa (Kuyawa Kata) · GitHub Kuyawa Kata's (Kuyawa) software portfolio | Devpost
Lawal (UtilityCoder): Utilitycoder (Lawal Abubakar Babatunde) · GitHub

DevPost Project Link:
Devpost
(submission in progress! Demo video coming soon.)

Project Goal: Support nonprofits, charitable institutions and regenerative initiatives using blockchain/Web3 technology, built on TRON.

In a time of worldwide uncertainty, GiveTron leverages blockchain technology to enable cooperation, impact, and mutually beneficial solutions between communities across national boundaries.

Project Value:
Registered nonprofits and vetted charitable initiatives can use GiveTron to receive crypto token donations to support their work and generate impact.

GiveTron is an implementation of CFCE’s Giving Universe platform on Tron, seeking to empower Tron’s millions of users to generate real-world impact- currently through donations, in the future through yield-bearing DeFi implementations (e.g. bioregional liquidity pools governed by DAOs and Green Bonds backed by NFT Impact Certificates).

Every donation mints a non-transferrable donation receipt NFT containing the donation details, which are tied to the user’s profile.

Nonprofits can keep their donors updated on the progress of their initiatives by posting pictures and impact data to their profile on GiveTron. The photos and impact data are minted as Story NFTs.

Additionally, nonprofits can create events and onboard volunteers, who then receive a Volunteer NFT and can receive token rewards for participating in activities and generating verifiable impact (for example, planting trees, distributing food, or volunteering in other ways).

Users can track the impact of their donations by clicking on the NFT in their profile, which takes them to the relevant nonprofit initiative to show how their donations are being used.

Tron network’s role as the leading blockchain for payments and its active community make it a great network for charitable donations. We are grateful to be building on Tron and look forward to empowering millions of Tron users to start generating, tracking, and rewarding impact on-chain.

Project Info:
GiveTron Walkthrough Video:

GiveTronV1

CFCE Pitch Deck:
CFCE Pitch Deck V2.pdf (1005.7 KB)

Project Websites:
www.give-tron.vercel.app

github.com

GitHub - CollaborativeEconomics/give-tron: Donations in Tron network

Donations in Tron network

Project Test Instructions:
GiveTron is currently live on the Shasta testnet.
Users who want to test GiveTron should click “Sign In” and connect their TronLink wallet, with testnet TRX.
Next, users should select the organization “Center for Collaborative Economics” to donate to, then follow the forms to donate testnet TRX, and mint an NFT receipt which will arrive in their user profile section (top right).

When making a donation, users can opt to enter their contact information and receive an emailed donation receipt for tax deduction purposes if they are donating to an organization in their jurisdiction.
See a demo of the donation process here:

GiveTronV1

Project Details:
Initially, GiveTron will be released as a public good for the Tron community. The first period of onboarding users and nonprofits, building community and iterating on our platform will be fee-free. Later, we will begin charging fees in line with industry standards, like 3%- which is still much lower than the 5-15% charged by many legacy/Web2 nonprofit donation processors!

However, we want to make it clear that even beyond the fees generated by our platform, GiveTron also represents a potentially profitable and investable business.

Running a nonprofit is complicated and often expensive, and our project makes it much simpler.
GiveTron decreases costs associated with transmitting donations, removes friction from the process of tracking impact, and most importantly, enables new models of supporting nonprofits and regenerative initiatives- for example, issuing Green Bonds backed by Impact Credits issued on our platform, or rewarding impact investors with yield earned through DeFi products such as liquidity pools or lending.

This means that CFCE is building infrastructure which removes cost and time and improves existing models of philanthropy. This synergy between philanthropy, fintech and blockchain enables new SaaS business models, allowing us to target diverse customer demographics such as philanthropic foundations, international NGOs and large nonprofit tech providers, grant funders/impact investors, corporate social responsibility initiatives and impact consultancy firms, and even government/multilateral development institutions.

Right now, much of the Web3 world is focused on blockchain for financial speculation. However, we at CFCE strongly believes that the primary utility of blockchain and Web3 is actually to empowering impact. But impact and profit are not mutually exclusive- quite the opposite.

We believe that making a positive impact can and will be a lucrative business opportunity, as humanity’s focus shifts from extractive, exploitative business models and begins to focus on harmonious solutions that benefit all participants, including the environment. That’s Collaborative Economics, and that’s what GiveTron enables.

GiveTron Homepage:

GiveTron Donation/NFT Minting Screen:

GiveTron Nonprofit Impact Initiative NFT Story Feed (Sample)

Smart Contract links:

TRONSCAN | TRON BlockChain Explorer

TRONSCAN | TRON BlockChain Explorer

Project Milestones:
Current level of completion:
-GiveTron donations and donation receipt NFT minting are live on the Shasta testnet currently (10/4/2024)

-Volunteer-to-Earn events (enabling nonprofits to reward volunteers for creating positive impact) will be live on Shasta testnet by 11/8/2024

-“Vouches” (user impact verification NFTs) and “Personal Impact Story NFTs” (allowing users to upload their own impact and mint as NFTs) features to be implemented by 11/31/2024

-Internal beta/QA testing of GiveTron to be accomplished by December 13 2024

-Release of GiveTron to mainnet with donations for (at least) 24 registered nonprofits in (at least) 17 countries (USA, Indonesia, Nigeria, Gabon, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic, Uganda, Phillipines, Colombia, Peru, Canada, UK, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Egypt (for Palestine): Q1 2025

GiveTron will be released both as an individual app in the Tron ecosystem and as a chain on CFCE’s multi-chain Giving Universe donation ecosystem. GiveTron makes use of UI elements, CFCE Registry donation database, and CFCE Partner Portal which were created before the HackaTron Season 7 Hackathon but the GiveTron app and all integrations were created exclusively during the hackathon period.

Giving Universe uses a unified architecture, featuring dedicated sub-apps for the 17 UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals, bioregional environmental impact, sharia-compliant philanthropy for Islamic donors, and mutual aid/disaster relief efforts.

Greatest priority for onboarding and partnerships will be given to NGOs, nonprofits and institutions from Global South and BRICS+ nations, because we firmly believe blockchain and Web3 can and should build peace and solidarity in a time of instability and uncertainty. We intend to build bridges, not walls.

[Youngyuppie]

Welcome to hackaTron S7! Now I understand why you gave an opinion on the need to have nonprofits and volunteers in ways of making donations for charitable campaigns. Your approach is great especially with the feature of integrating it to minting of NFTs upon making of donations. It will give a long starting feeling of involvement in the charitable project. I would like to know the process of onboarding nonprofits and charitable institutions.

Again, will you include a social engagement features where donors can give feedback on their satisfaction or disappointment in the execution of the charity project they donated funds to?

Finally, there is no NFT category in this hackathon season. You should consider changing your submission track to either Artistry or Web3 tracks.

[EvanCFCE]

Hi there! Thank you for the kind words.

Our specific process for onboarding nonprofits has three stages: due diligence + approval/rejection, tech onboarding, and customization. I’ll preface the explanation by saying that this is a work in progress as our platform hasn’t launched yet- but I’ll explain what we’ve done so far with our nonprofit partners so far.

When we connect with a nonprofit or foundation, the first step after making initial contact is to learn as much as possible about the entity based on their online footprint and available records. In addition to a zoom meeting with members of the group and looking at their available material online, we also inquire about their legal status, look up their EIN number and ratings on available platforms like GuideStar and CharityNavigator. At this point, sometimes we find that it’s not a good fit, and decline to proceed further.

If the nonprofit meets our criteria, we’ll help them set up through our partner’s portal and, if necessary, help them get the necessary crypto wallets and/or exchange accounts set up. This often takes some time, as many people in the nonprofit industry have very little experience with the world of blockchain.

We want the process to feel as comfortable and safe as possible so if necessary we’ll walk the nonprofit through all steps. (In the future, as we expand, this might not be feasible but for now, the one-to-one approach fits our needs).

Finally, once they are set up and understand the different parts of our platform- how to see donations, upload Story NFTs to show how donations are used, we can help them customize their experience.

For example, when a nonprofit partner makes a new initiative, they can add a smart contract from our readymade smart contract menu (this isn’t live on GiveTron yet)- for example, they can enable a contract to automatically split funds so that xx% amount from each donation goes to cover admin costs.

In the future, based on feedback from nonprofits, we’d like to also include a contract that automatically converts token donations to stablecoins, to protect against price fluctuations.

Okay- I think that covers our onboarding process as it stands currently. Like I said, we’re a small team and the platform hasn’t launched yet, so we have the luxury of emphasizing close relationships and providing concierge, turnkey service to our partners.

About the social engagement feature: that is a great idea! But we haven’t built the infrastructure for it yet.

The way we currently plan to handle this element is, at the conclusion of each nonprofit’s initiative, submitting the initiative for evaluation based on both an automatic assessment by a large language model, and a group of (paid) evaluators familiar with the project.

We are also connected with a number of other projects specializing in this large and complex topic, namely GitCoin Grants, KarmaGap and Impact Evaluation Foundation, and look forward to integrating with other projects working to solve the same problems.

(Side note: we are very interested in integrating with social media, for example allowing users and nonprofits to show their GiveTron profiles on other social media platforms, to drive engagement and more donations.

Allowing Twitter, Facebook, Telegram, Farcaster, WeChat, Line users and groups to display badges and raise money for their favorite causes would be a great driver for Web3 onboarding. But- we are a small team, and building one step at a time.)

Thanks for the great questions! And, I will change our submission to Web3 presently.

[Shangra1]

1. How does GiveTron leverage blockchain technology to enhance transparency and accountability for nonprofits and charitable foundations?

2. What specific features does GiveTron offer to facilitate donations and track the impact of contributions in real-time?

3. How can nonprofits integrate GiveTron into their existing operations, and what support is available for organizations new to blockchain technology?

[Okorie]

Welcome to S7 of hackathon
After reading, I can say your project has the potential to be a powerful force for good by leveraging blockchain technology for social impact.
But my queries are

• How is GiveTron going to measure the actual impact of donations beyond just the amount donated

• What steps have you put in place to ensure long-term financial stability for platform maintenance and growth beyond the initial fee-free phase.

[EvanCFCE]

Thanks for the questions!

1. GiveTron uses blockchain to increase transparency in two ways.
   First- all donations are on the blockchain forever, both the transactions themselves and minted as donation receipt NFTs.
   Second, nonprofits can use GiveTron to update their donors about progress on their initiatives and how donations have been used by minting Story NFTs on their project profiles, including photos of their work as well as embedding other types of impact data (budget expenditures, written reports, press releases, satellite pictures, sensor measurements) in the metadata of the Story NFTs.
   Donors can track the progress of charitable initiatives in real time, instead of just quarterly or yearly- conversely, GiveTron gives nonprofits a way to connect directly with their donor base and drive further engagement and fundraising.

2. GiveTron is a platform for donations, where every donation mints an NFT, and nonprofits can mint NFTs to update their donors about their progress. I would draw your attention to our ImpactLink feature, where the metadata in donation receipt NFTs is connected to the metadata in Impact Story NFTs uploaded by nonprofits- so donors can see when and how their donation is used. This is something that wouldn’t be possible without blockchain technology, and as far as we know has never been done anywhere else!

3. Great question! Making the onboarding process as smooth, safe and comfortable as possible for our nonprofit partners is one of our main priorities. The main feature enabling smooth integration with existing nonprofit CRM tools would be our Partner Portal, where nonprofits can track all donations received and export them to other platforms as a .csv or .pdf file.

(Please note that CFCE Partner Portal, like our CFCE Registry database, was not built for HackaTron Season 7- we built them in 2023, but integrated them with Tron for this hackathon. GiveTron, however, was built for this hackathon)

As far as support for nonprofits: since we are still quite a small project and are only currently working with about a dozen nonprofit partners, we are able to provide one-to-one tech support to nonprofits.

Several of our partners are Web3 native and quite tech savvy, so only required a small amount of training, but the majority of nonprofit employees are completely new to crypto and so required some extra attention, which we were of course happy to provide.

Thanks again for the questions!

[EvanCFCE]

Hello Okorie! Thank you for the questions and kind words.

-We envision impact measurement on GiveTron is done in three ways, starting with reporting by the nonprofits themselves, then rewarding nearby community actors for verifying the reports, and finally initiative impact evaluation being done at the conclusion of initiatives.

Specifically, a big part of our platform is how nonprofits can upload “Story NFTs” showing the impact they generate using donations. To users, this looks similar to a Facebook or Instagram feed, with pictures uploaded by the nonprofit, but nonprofits also can include a lot of information in the metadata of the NFT (uploaded to IPFS).

For example, they can upload specific budget information, include .pdf reports or text, audio, documents (an example would be press releases from local media about the event). This portion of GiveTron is already completed and working.

Impact measurement is already a big and thriving industry, and we have deliberately designed our Story NFT impact certificate system to be interoperable with standards in the impact investing and sustainable development industry like the UN 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (when nonprofits mint a Story NFT, they choose which types of impact/SDGs it is related to).

In order to bring GiveTron to as many customers as possible, want this tool to be useful for existing actors such as multilateral institutions, impact consultancies and international NGOs who already do this type of verification.

Next will be increasing data fidelity and ensuring trustworthiness by having outside actors and community members “vouch for” the claims made by nonprofits. The way this will be done is by giving GiveTron users the ability to verify the impact claimed in the nonprofit’s Story impact certificates.
These “vouches” will be minted as NFTs and included in the user’s profile, providing a record of their actions and contributions. This feature is in progress and will be completed by December 2024.

The final layer is a planned community review process. Every Story NFT is uploaded by nonprofits to an Initiative, focused on a specific domain or field of impact, defined by a time period and specific goals. When those initiatives finish, they will contain a list of Impact Story NFTs representing the progress made towards the goals outlined when the initiative was created.

Our idea is for these completed initiatives to be submitted for community review, ideally by expert third parties including both community members and subject matter experts. To be transparent, we have not built this yet but have been collaborating with other industry experts for design and implementation by Q2 2025. We have already begun experimenting with LLMs like ChatGPT to assess initiative impact and generate reports and assessments of different initiatives.

Question 2: How will GiveTron make itself sustainable?
We are creating tools designed to save money and time for a variety of customer demographics, namely NGOs, foundations and impact consultants. We plan to offer GiveTron and related tools to customers on a subscription basis, using a B2B SaaS model with subscription tiers based on amount of donations received. We previously won the FinAstra Hack to the Future 4 Hackathon in 2022 and were invited to list our finished and tested app in their App marketplace for customers in fintech- this is one example of how we could begin to market our products to paying customers as a B2B SaaS entity.

For small community nonprofits who receive relatively small amounts of donations, GiveTron will always be free, representing our dedication to supporting the initiatives who need it most. For larger nonprofits, nonprofits who receive large amounts of donations, corporate clients, consultants, foundations, and government/multilateral institutions, we will be able to charge fees necessary to make GiveTron sustainable and financially rewarding.

Additionally, our longer-term roadmap centers squarely around the concept of using DeFi to make impact profitable- for users, for nonprofits and community initiatives, for investors and for our team. Our north star in this regard centers around two big ideas:
a) A platform where users can provide liquidity in pools belonging to nonprofits, which generate yield by lending out the funds to DeFi protocols and (ideally, eventually) institutional players for use in the legacy financial markets (for example- cross border payments, overnight repos, and government financial instrument/bond purchases)

b) A mechanism by which our impact certificates (and the progress towards solving shared problems they represent) become Impact Credits similar to Carbon Credits in today’s markets. These impact credits could then be packaged into green bonds issued to fund community projects and reward investors/volunteers, as well as serving as the underlying asset for other instruments.

As you can see, we’ve got big plans! Donations are just the beginning. But, we are a small team with limited resources, building one thing at a time. If any of this sounds interesting, we would love to connect further with any interested collaborators, investors or foundations to continue the conversation.

[Okorie]

@EvanCFCE
Thanks for taking your time in explaining it to my understanding bit by bit.

[EvanCFCE]

My pleasure. Let me know if you have any further questions.

[ines_valerie]

Welcome to the Hackathon of season 7, I really have fun as I am reading you’re project, please tell me as you’re platform is growing how are you going to be handling the increasing volume of transactions and the management of nfts, thank you

[EvanCFCE]

Hello Ines! Thank you for your kind words.

First, let me say that a large volume of transactions and NFTs minted would be a good problem to have- and we look forward to crossing that bridge when we get there.

In the meantime, we’ve already got the infrastructure in place for GiveTron to scale- first by choosing blockchains like Tron with low transaction cost, second by developing a robust database infrastructure via our CFCE Registry database back end (which tracks all users, donations, nonprofits, initiatives and story NFTs).

We limit the size and amount of data that can be uploaded with each Story NFT to 3mb; and in their current form donation NFTs take less than a MB.

Since we store all our NFT data on IPFS with a cost of about $0.15 per gigabyte, this means that we can afford to have users and nonprofits minting quite a few Donation Receipt NFTs and Impact Story NFTs- we anticipate being able to cover the complete costs of our platform for $50 or less for the first few months of operation at the very least. (And again- if we experience a strong surge in user and donation volume- that would be a great problem to have!)

As far as longer-term plans and how to deal with increased storage costs as GiveTron scales- the simplest way would just be to pass on some of the costs to users- for example, an option for the user to cover the costs for NFT minting and storage at checkout for an extra $0.25 added to their donation, or setting up a special initiative to cover the platform’s storage and admin costs.

I hope that answers your question and gives you some insight into how we plan for GiveTron to scale. If you have any more questions please don’t hesitate to ask!

[manfred_jr]

Welcome to Hackathon Season 7, after a careful read I can deduce that this is an innovative initiative aimed at leveraging blockchain technology to enhance charitable donations and impact tracking for nonprofits and charitable organizations.
Beyond the initial fee-free period, how will you ensure sustainability while remaining attractive to nonprofits? What other revenue streams would be explored?

[EvanCFCE]

Hi Manfred! Great question.

About revenue models, to put it succinctly, we will be targeting three sources of revenue:

1. A “freemium” fee structure which keeps our basic services and platform free and then charges some fees to nonprofits and foundations which receive a higher volume of donations.

2. A Business-to-Business Software-as-a-Service (B2B SaaS) model where we target customer demographics including (but not limited to) foundations, international NGOs, corporate social responsibility departments and impact investors/consultant agencies, offering our platform as a bespoke, turnkey impact funding and tracking service.
   (Basically, blockchain is very useful for both distributing funds and tracking behavior, and by creating a platform which is useful for sending out money and tracking how it gets used to generate impact, we think we can generate considerable value for all the different customer demographics listed above)

3. Our main target or “north star” in the longer term involves using yields from decentralized finance to support nonprofits and regenerative/impact initiatives, and using the impact certificate NFTs of our platform as the foundation for new financial instruments. Think carbon credits, but instead of for carbon, for impact like reducing hunger, helping refugees, cleaning water, and other goals.

Our main goal is to make it so that people can earn money by either funding or creating impact. We would love to create a system of liquidity pools where people can deposit funds and earn yield while also funding nonprofits without relying on donations or grants.

Finally: the data we are gathering about who funds impact and who generates impact is valuable, and we could sell it, but we want to make sure to do this in a way that is both ethical and respects privacy. We are investigating the use of zero-knowledge proofs for this use case.

[ines_valerie]

Thank you for your reply to me you explain very very good and it make it easy for understanding, please tell me are you going to be expanding to other blockchains so you will allow donation in other cryptocurrency, thank you

[EvanCFCE]

Yes certainly! We recognize that the future is multi-chain and interoperable.
Our Giving Universe multi-chain platform will support many blockchains, not only Tron.

GiveTron is specific to Tron, but we also used this hackathon as an opportunity to add Tron’s architecture to our multi-chain app. And all the apps are connected to our underlying database, CFCE Registry.

[ines_valerie]

Thank you for your reply to me I understand you more clearer now

[manfred_jr]

It’s clear that GiveTron is positioning itself strategically with a diversified revenue model that leverages blockchain.
How do you plan to navigate the regulatory landscape as your platform introduces financial instruments like impact certificates?

[EvanCFCE]

Hi Manfred- excellent question. It’s a bit of a difficult one to answer, because the regulatory landscapes surrounding both blockchain and impact investing are very fluid.

This complexity is compounded by the fact that our vision is international- in order for our model to be effective, and to generate the maximum possible impact, we want to be able to work in many countries- ideally all of them!

Our strategy at this point is simply to come up with working products. We have already designed our platform to be compliant with regulations- for example, our NFTs carry absolutely zero monetary value, and are non-transferable. They serve only as markers of impact- think of them as raw material for financial instruments to be built on later.

Our other main North Star in this regard is partnering with experts and entities who are already embedded in the space- ideally in jurisdictions which are forward-thinking when it comes to regulation in both crypto/blockchain and impact certification. To give a few examples, Hong Kong’s forward-thinking frameworks for green bonds, Switzerland’s support for tokenized Real World Assets and Dubai’s support for blockchain to be integrated with legacy financial services like cross-border payments (after all, donations are a form of payment).

We view regulatory compliance and integration with existing systems as absolutely key for our project’s sustainability and success. We’re not trying to disrupt- we’re trying to build on and improve existing models, and enable new forms of value to flow to the people and communities who need it most.

[manfred_jr]

It’s great to see that you’re prioritizing regulatory compliance and taking a thoughtful, proactive approach, especially given the complexity of blockchain and impact investing across multiple jurisdictions.
Do you have plans for user education campaigns, particularly in countries where blockchain or crypto adoption is still in its infancy?

[EvanCFCE]

Yes absolutely!! This is a Huge part of our eventual success. We look at this in three different ways:
a) user education- everything we make, we want to make it accessible enough that our grandmas could use it. The bar to entry for Web3 is still extremely high, and it scares a lot of people off. So the first step is making tools that are intuitive, safe and create a tangible positive impact.

(a side note here is, using blockchain for positive impact runs counter to how blockchain/web3 is often used: there is a perception that cryptocurrency just means gambling, scams, sketchy possibly illegal tools and platforms that will cause people to lose money. We feel strongly that there is an opportunity to onboard literally billions of people by showing that this technology is useful for financial inclusion, transparency and impact- sending money cheaply, and keeping track of positive actions on-chain. So, in every country we want to make it accessible and inclusive for our users.)

B) Nonprofits: We started working on our project in late 2021, and since then blockchain/web3 has come a long way with public perception. However, there is still a lot of stigma attached to blockchain. Nonprofits, and smaller community organizations in particular tend to be not very sophisticated technologically. They are risk-averse and want to avoid anything that could get them in trouble or cause them to lose money.
Additionally, nonprofit employees tend to be very busy and don’t want to spend a lot of time learning new platforms or doing yet more admin/paperwork. So education on how to use our tools, and ideally making it so that nonprofit partners have to spend under 1 hour per week to do everything from cashing out donations to uploading/minting impact NFTs, is a priority. Our education for nonprofits is one-to-one and bespoke, so we work with every partner to walk them through every step and provide tech assistance as necessary. In different jurisdictions, and different cultures, this will look different as we expand. Ideally we’d like to hire people with proficiency in different languages and cultures to assist nonprofits in different regions.

C) Partnerships with other entities- corporations, foundations, government entities, financial institutions/impact investment firms. Here, the challenge is providing institution-grade materials and integrating with their existing tech stacks. We are 100% certain our solutions can remove friction and provide data these entities desperately need- specifically, sending money where it needs to go, and tracking the impact created by those charitable donations. Our challenge will be first attracting those entities as paying customers, then onboarding and integrating into their existing structures. We haven’t reached this stage yet but I feel that the education/onboarding process will continue to emphasize relationships and building custom solutions, walking alongside our partners every step of the way so they feel taken care of and we can exceed their expectations.

More broadly speaking, we look forward to creating onboarding materials that are accessible as well as marketing the work we do (and our nonprofit partners are doing with our platform) in both video and text formats. For example, interviews with the staff of the nonprofits about their work. But first we have to get our platform up and running. One step at a time!