GiveTron: Charitable Crypto Donations and NFT Impact Certification on Tron

TRON Hackathon Hackathon Season 7
41

Hi GamesFi!
For right now, we can onboard nonprofits individually, and this is probably the approach we will take- focusing on relationships first, and taking a more in-depth approach to due diligence for each organization. We can also offer one-on-one tech support for each organization.

In the future, if everything goes as we hope, we will be onboarding many dozens or many hundreds of nonprofits, and will be unable to provide one-on-one onboarding and tech support for every nonprofit. At this point our emphasis will shift more towards extensive, in-depth documentation. (Of course we will still have documentation, FAQs, How-To guides and so on before we launch to main net)

We are also very interested in using language models like ChatGPT for, among other things, automated customer service, but haven’t incorporated that yet. (We also would like to use LLMs for impact assessment and summarization but that is another story).

42

Thanks for the heads-up!

43

Excellent questions @Chukseucharia

  1. For right now, GiveTron donations are only denominated in TRX, but in the future we plan to expand to USDT and then possibly other tokens. The key concerns for other tokens to be enabled would be liquidity and stability. Enabling donations in memecoins could be a great way to enhance donation volume, but tokens that are unstable in price could be difficult or anxiety-inducing for our nonprofit partners, who probably aren’t interested in gambling with their donations.

  2. One key feature nonprofits have almost universally asked for is a way to automatically switch non-stable tokens to stablecoins so that their donations don’t fluctuate in value- we intend to build this early next year or at the end of this year.

There are a couple ways we could approach this- for example, using ERC-4337 account abstraction to enable permissions for nonprofit accounts to automatically execute trades on decentralized exchanges. Another way would be for our organization to maintain pools of the tokens and offer the automatic switching of non-stable tokens for stablecoins as a service to nonprofits for a fee. We haven’t built either of these methods yet, but we are certainly working towards it because literally every nonprofit we work with asks us about it.

  1. Our vetting process right now has three steps- two up-front and one ongoing. The first is contact with the nonprofit staff to learn about their organization, their history, operations and initiatives. We only have a few partners at this stage so we are putting relationships first. The second stage involves due diligence in the classical sense of the word- looking up the organization’s history, online footprint, available paperwork and records, and so on. After the first or second stage, sadly many organizations are filtered out. The final stage involves keeping track of how the organization spends donated funds and tracks/reports the impact. We actively moderate the nonprofit organizations and if we see fraud or users report suspected fraud, we can sever the relationship at any time to protect our donors and users of our platform.

In the beginning, we are only accepting partnerships with established, registered nonprofits which are older than 1 year who are in good standing with their local government. This could change in the future but that’s our main criteria right now.

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44

Hi @MhiztaNonso02 this is a great question. I think it depends on the region, and depends on the organization. Different nonprofits will have different needs. Let me explain what I mean.
One of our partner organizations is a mental health advocacy nonprofit based in the UK. Their executive director is very familiar with cryptocurrency, web3, and already accepts crypto donations. Onboarding this organization was very easy! It probably took 5 minutes to show him our platform and explain how everything worked.

Another of our partners is based in Colombia, and works with indigenous people who are taking care of a part of their jungle. The man who runs this organization is pretty familiar with computers, and slightly familiar with cryptocurrency, but still needed some help with setting up a crypto wallet. Onboarding this guy required an interpreter who spoke both spanish and english and also some more in-depth lessons on how to use our platform. It took about 30 minutes.

Finally, there were two other nonprofits. One is an organization in Gabon working on using solar power to pump water for rural villages. The other one is here in the United States, working to conserve and protect river ecosystems. The people running these organizations had absolutely zero experience with blockchain, zero interest in technology, and needed a lot more step-by-step instruction on how to use our platform.

So, you can see that at this stage, every single organization is different and has its own needs. We are currently committed to providing this assistance, as we on-board and support our partner organizations individually. In the future this might be impossible (or very time-consuming) but for right now, that’s our approach. Later on, we will hire some customer relations team members, and train AI/LLM models like ChatGPT to provide assistance, but for right now, it’s just humans working with humans.

45

Hello Manfred, at this point I am starting to consider you an old friend. In the past weeks I think we have talked together more than anyone else.

Your question is a good one, and as I see it, it concerns the very nature of what we are building at CFCE. Is it a donation app? Or a platform? Or perhaps even a protocol? My answer is simply, “yes.”
If people want to donate crypto, they can access GiveTron and make a user profile. So it is an app.
If a nonprofit wants to accept donations and upload its impact data as NFTs to incentivize further donations and prove their impact, they can make a profile on GiveTron- so it is a platform.
What I view your question to be about on a fundamental level is, how about opening up your platform so that it can integrate with other platforms, or even become the foundation of other apps and platforms?
I would answer that there are currently three places where this could be done. We haven’t done them yet (not for GiveTron anyway) but we have ambitious plans to do something like this in the future.

First- we recognize that the data stored in the CFCE Registry (about donations sent, donation NFTs minted, impact data uploaded, and impact story NFTs minted) is potentially valuable. In fact- this might be the most valuable part of our platform, even more than donation fees! It could be very useful, for example, to social media companies, advertisers, banks, insurance companies, or even governments.

This donation data and impact data helps build pictures of how people interact with their communities and environments- the positive actions they are undertaking to help society. It also shows what they are interested in and care about.

Building an API to access the data in our registry- especially if it was sorted according to demographic or geographic region- or to “use our registry as a service” could be valuable indeed.

Second, for another project on the Stellar blockchain, a carbon credit donation app we received a Stellar Community Foundation grant to build named GiveCredit, we built an API to interact with our partner StellarCarbon’s platform, in order to automatically input carbon credit metadata into our app. It can be done!

Third, we actually just met with a fellow ReFi in Arbitrum grantee DivaDonate today to discuss how they could potentially use an API to tap in to our Impact Story NFT feature- basically, accessing the impact NFTs and data from our platform to upload and display on their app. This is a promising avenue of thought (and could provide a key element for turning our donation app into a profitable business/platform/protocol).

Sorry for the long answer, but you have a knack for asking questions about topics I am very passionate about @manfred_jr !

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46

Pitching me to be an old friend of yours gives me the irk like I grew older by a century overnight considering it was my birthday yesterday lol.
I really appreciate your insight into how you’re planning to expand beyond donations and offer more utility to external platforms and entities, it’s clear that you’re evolving into something quite unique, a hybrid between an app, platform, and protocol, capable of unlocking significant value in the future.
Are you considering offering data visualization tools that could help nonprofits or external entities understand the trends in donations or impact in a more intuitive way? This would provide value not only to nonprofits tracking their donations but also to businesses or researchers wanting to analyze trends without needing deep technical expertise.

P.S - Oh yeah, I’ve a nack for asking questions that hit home and it’s ok with the long responses, reading Novels are my hobbies.

47

What challenges do you expect when moving from onboarding individual nonprofits to onboarding large groups?

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48

Happy birthday!!
to answer your question:
Yes, in fact we are building this now as part of our Stellar grant. We’re building this data visualizer as part of an admin dashboard for our “partner portal” (like our user profile for nonprofit partners, where they upload impact info and track donations).

Our initial version of this feature will be quite simple, just a visual adaptation of the donation data represented in graphs. We foresee this being particularly valuable in delivering insights to nonprofit partners and, eventually, foundations and corporate/consulting partners who wish to learn more about how to create impact most efficiently.

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49

The top three would be:
a) Many nonprofits are not technologically sophisticated. Teaching them the tools for onboarding into web3 will be a bit labor and time-intensive. We plan to hold regular onboarding sessions where we can work with groups, instead of individuals.

b) As more users come to our platform, we’ll have more tech support requests. AI chat bots can provide some automated help, but we’ll also have to hire team members for this role.

c) We’ll be working with nonprofits and initiatives across cultural, national and linguistic barriers. In addition to regulatory complexity, we also want to make sure we can provide support for them in a way that makes them feel comfortable and respected. Ideally we will be able to find team members on the ground in each region where we work.

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50

This is truly innovation at it’s finest and, you’ve my vote.

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51

Thank you sir! It’s much appreciated.

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52

I was reviewing your project. It is unfortunate to see youv been eliminated but since you re uneligible will you continue on this forum?

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Of course! We will continue working on GiveTron. Right now our main focus is on transferring its unique codebase to our unified architecture so that we can support donations on Tron on our multi-chain platform.
We hope to finish this project by the end of next week and then start to implement a feature where every user and every nonprofit is represented on-chain by an ERC-6551 token-bound account. This will allow us to keep an on-chain record of all user behavior and impact NFTs, and also to implement other features like users verifying impact claims made by nonprofits, and uploading pictures of the work they do as volunteers.

It is disappointing to have been disqualified from this hackathon because we spent a lot of time and effort (and money! developers do not work for free) on this application and getting our app working, and we didn’t receive any warning that anything was wrong, or any feedback on how to fix it.

We suspect we were disqualified because the judges mistakenly attempted to test the app on Tron MainNet instead of Shasta TestNet, where it was working the entire submission period. But, that’s the nature of the game, and we will continue to work. It is better to not get upset about things which you do not control. So, we will move onward and upward!

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54

@EvanCFCE I try to check in the project site but is not working I hope is not bug from the site

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55

Ok that was so detailed and so ambitious but it’s good you have a good plan for your project. Good luck to you as you continue to develop and expand your project

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56

I look at project, sorry for disqualify. Project has very kind meaning behind it. What was its inspiration? I would like to see you guys in next Hackatron. :slightly_smiling_face:

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57

good to hear, ill keep a keen eye on yall. Im expecting big things from GiveTron

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58

https://give-tron.vercel.app/ isn’t working for you? Could you take a screenshot and post a picture of the error? It’s working for me, across different browsers, and donations + NFT minting as well.
Please remember to use Shasta test net if you are testing out donations!