Donating to charity in a web2 world is a very straightforward transaction. You find a charity or cause you want to support, you enter your payment method, and you give. The cause is furthered through your financial contribution and you take home the satisfaction of knowing you helped the wider world.

But what if you could take home more than just a hit to the ego and also snag some digital art?

Ecosapiens—the digital collectibles company that helps heal planet earth through the sale of carbon-credit nonfungible tokens (NFTs) thinks it’s developed just the thing:

A limited NFT drop that allows patrons to not only give to charity in real-time but also allows them to take home a digital collectible.

After Nihar Neelakanti, co-founder and chief executive officer of Ecosapiens, understood the severity of the devastating Maui fires, he decided to try to use his company’s pre-existing platform of giving through NFTs to create a one-off NFT that could help people donate financial support in real-time to the Maui fire victims.

The company already had a volcanic-based character in its vault—and so for the first time ever—the team decided to put a charitable NFT up on OpenSea and partner with on-chain charitable organization Endaoment to test if real-time giving through NFTs was something people could understand and get behind.

The company didn’t know what to expect, and while the test didn’t raise much money, the fact people were moved to take part in the drop shows there’s an appetite—albeit a small one—from which to build upon and learn from.

“Within a matter of 48 hours, we got the team together, marketed the NFT through our own channels, and got it up on OpenSea,” Neelakanti said to me in a recent phone conversation—stressing that, “These things are not that common.”

A Mauisapien

With time of the essence, the company needed to move fast.

“If you make a collection, you can’t have all the pieces look the same,” Neelakanti said. “Because we needed to get the drop out the door within 48 hours, there was no way we could make a generative collection within that time frame.”

The company opted for an open edition, and quite a few benefactors supported the drop. According to Neelakanti, prolific NFT art collector Gmoney minted 20 of them himself—and while the company only minted 82 Mauisapiens, raising $820—the fact that people were motivated to quickly give to charity using NFTs proves the model has promise.

“The price point was fairly low—$10—which was designed to not be a barrier,” Neelakanti said. “A lot of people told us this was the first time they donated to a cause in real-time.”

Could one have donated to the Maui fires through another more traditional means? Absolutely. But would they have been able to use crypto currency at such a rapid pace while also receiving an intriguing piece of digital art? Probably not.

Coming out of the drop, Ecosapiens believes they’ve created a unique model to provide relief to crises happening in real-time through NFTs. The startup joins the ranks of others like Pussy Riot, Trippy Labs and PleasrDAO that are using crypto for philanthropic causes. The aforementioned trio of entities comprise UkraineDAO, which was formed in 2022 and has raised over $3 million ETH for the Ukraine army in its battle against the Russian invasion.

Read more: How a DAO Is Logging Evidence of War Crimes in Iran and Ukraine on the Blockchain

“If we can quickly spin up collections that provide money to relief organizations and also give consumers a really cool token for that impact—a really cool piece of art—I think there’s something sustainable in that kind of product offering,” Neelakanti said.

While the quick-turnaround experiment was not on Ecosapiens’ initial roadmap, Neelakanti believes the concept of making collections that provide relief for immediate climate crises is something the company will do more of in the future.

“Again, we got quite a lot of live feedback from people saying, ‘I haven’t donated to something this quickly before,’” he said. “That for us was the product-market-fit indicator so to speak.”

The biggest hurdle was seeing if people could quickly grasp web3 technology in real-time in order to make a donation, or, if donations would be limited to the pools of people who already understand web3 and how it works. Would creating a web3 wallet fuel skepticism and act as a deterrent?

According to Neelakanti, there were a lot of “non-web3 native” people who purchased the Mauisapiens.

“People came in and bought charitable NFTs and didn’t ask about some speculative value or when prices will go up,” Neelakanti said. “I think that shows an early indication that using NFTs for charity is a category that’s durable and sustainable.”