In this episode, Sunny Ray talks with Connie, founder of the nonprofit BitGive and its transparency platform GiveTrack, about turning Bitcoin wealth into real world impact. Connie explains why she built GiveTrack on top of Bitcoin rather than Ethereum, citing the network's long term security, size, and twelve year uptime. She describes how the platform uses RSK to add smart contract functionality on Bitcoin, letting donors track funds from wallet to project milestone. The conversation covers BitGive's eight years of work, its projects in 27 countries, and a recently completed COVID emergency relief fund that distributed almost 16,000 dollars. Connie highlights NGOs on the platform, from Black Girls Code and Heifer International to Code to Inspire, a coding school for young women in Herat, Afghanistan. She also touches on year end tax benefits of crypto giving and how pro bono support from firms like Goodwin Law made GiveTrack's compliance work possible. The episode closes with a live screen share demo of givetrack.org, walking through donation options including Bitcoin, Uphold, and Wyre.
BitGive's Connie explains how GiveTrack tracks Bitcoin donations on chain from pledge to real world NGO impact.
Have you experimented with Clubhouse at all?
I got on it recently, around Martin Luther King Jr. Day when I had more time to actually listen. It was really cool, you can jump in and out of different rooms and just listen, and you get the pulse on things from smart people. My first room was actually as a speaker, talking about BitGive.
Why would you even want to build GiveTrack on top of Bitcoin instead of Ethereum?
We get asked this a lot because of all the ICO hype elsewhere, but technically Bitcoin is the top, front and center, long term sustainable solution to build on. I'm in this for the long game, not short term gains. We work in 27 countries and need something usable in 10 years, and Bitcoin's network size, node count, and 12 years without being hacked make it that system.
What's the message for people who are very philanthropic and sitting on large bitcoin gains, and don't know what to do with it?
We've spent almost eight years teaching NGOs to actually use crypto technology, not just converting it to fiat for them. We built a platform on top of Bitcoin using RSK for more complexity, and we teach NGOs why the tech matters. It's multi level, having impact on the ground today while demonstrating the benefits of the tech with real use cases and real onboarding at the institutional level.
Any updates you want to share before we dive into the demo?
We just announced completion of our COVID emergency relief fund. We put out almost 16,000 dollars to three different beneficiaries, using our platform to fundraise and then distribute the funds. It covered medical workers needing PPE, vulnerable populations in the US and Africa who lost income, and gig and service workers who had nowhere to go when everything shut down.
Aside from donating bitcoin to one of the NGOs, are there other ways the community can help your mission?
We're a nonprofit with limited resources, so donated services help a lot. Perkins Coie and Goodwin Law have given us extensive pro bono legal work, and Waxman PR has done pro bono PR for years. Goodwin's support is actually why GiveTrack could become GDPR compliant. Just sharing about us and telling people we have real use cases also really helps.
What are some examples of the NGOs on GiveTrack?
We have a full spectrum, from small ones in places like Uganda up to mid sized groups like the Water Project building projects in Africa. Code to Inspire runs a coding school for young women in Herat, Afghanistan, teaching graphic design, web development, and blockchain. Then we have large organizations like Save the Children, Heifer International, and Black Girls Code currently fundraising on the platform.
Can you walk through how someone actually supports a project on GiveTrack?
Using Black Girls Code as an example, each project states its goal upfront, like 10,000 dollars split into milestones such as 10 laptops per stage, and posts updates as fundraising progresses. Donors can give directly in bitcoin, through Uphold in over 60 fiat and crypto currencies, or via Wyre, which converts credit or debit card and Apple Pay payments into bitcoin sent straight to the project's tracked wallet.
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