Will Crypto Play a Role in Funding Abortion Access?

Crypto for a Cause

Last year, thousands of people raised more than $40 million in Ether, a top cryptocurrency, through a DAO in just a week with the hope of buying a first printing of the United States Constitution. Then the DAO lost the auction to Ken Griffin, the billionaire founder of the hedge fund Citadel, and the group began to dissolve.

Jonah Erlich, a core contributor, still thinks ConstitutionDAO was a valuable experiment. “The speed at which we were able to move, as well as how many people were able to contribute, was a big success,” he said. (Refunding contributors has been much harder; the group had to cover the high transaction fees associated with the Ethereum blockchain, so it’s working with less money than it raised. “That is a problem that’s still being worked on,” Mr. Erlich said.)

Separately, UkraineDAO, organized in part by Nadya Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot, raised more than $7 million in a few days by selling an NFT of a Ukrainian flag. In March, President Volodymyr Zelensky signed into law a bill legalizing cryptocurrency exchanges in the country. As of that month, according to Alex Bornyakov, Ukraine’s deputy minister of digital transformation, the country had received nearly $100 million in crypto donations.

But these are isolated examples in what remains for many an impenetrable sphere of finance. Only 16 percent of Americans have experience with cryptocurrencies — through investing, trading or paying for things — according to a recent Pew survey, and more than half of them are men. Affluent men. Those demographics can mean that the fanciful projects some crypto entrepreneurs have proposed don’t always reflect public interests, and can seem driven by impulse.

“Anytime there’s a problem, people say that crypto or web3 is going to be the solution without putting much thought into it,” said Molly White, a software developer who has been archiving crypto crashes and missteps on a website called Web3 Is Going Just Great.

Ms. White pointed to the crypto project Nemus, which aims to raise funds for the Amazon rainforest. “People are talking about protecting portions of the Amazon rainforest, but they’re using blockchains that are very damaging to the environment,” she said, referring to the energy-intensive process of putting cryptocurrencies into circulation. “It’s like they don’t see the damage they’re doing with the solutions that they’re proposing.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/14/style/abortion-crypto-donations.html