Last September, Opera, the web browser, announced a partnership with the carbon negative, mobile-first blockchain, Celo. Together they launched MiniPay, a noncustodial wallet with native browser integration. Arriving first in Africa – where Opera has more than 100 million users – the tech enables folks to send stablecoins through existing mobile numbers.

“It's a real world use case where you can easily send money to friends and family, and pay bills,” Drew Simon said recently, speaking from a green-colored room in his Toronto home, his back wall draped in musical instruments. 

“It’s onboarding people to web3 by using pre-existing technology and meeting people where they're at,” he continued. “What it's done is lower the barrier by helping folks.”

Simon is the founder of Crypto Altruism, an online platform that spotlights blockchain projects creating social impact. It’s largely grant funded, and some of that money has come from Celo.

Prior to web3, Simon worked in higher education and the nonprofit world, where “lowering the barrier” remains a considerable hurdle. “In the nonprofit sector, there's huge inequality in terms of the massive organizations getting all the funding versus smaller grassroots organizations,” he said, “and I don't want to see that exacerbated by web3.”

Simon started exploring crypto in 2018. “The a-ha moment was when I looked at Bitcoin through the lens of a nonprofit. I saw it as a great tool for philanthropy and raising funds,” he remembered. “But when it came to Ethereum – programmable money – I saw so many other use cases of how we could leverage this technology for social good: impact monitoring and evaluation, decentralized governance models for impact projects, transferring funds to folks instantaneously without intermediaries.”

But Simon’s nonprofit community couldn’t see through the noise. For them crypto was “Ponzi schemes, ransomware attacks and shady super coders,” he said. “A lot of folks felt intimidated by the technology, so I said, okay, maybe I can do something about this.”

Crypto Altruism emerged in 2021. Simon’s aim was to demonstrate that good things, too, were happening in this space. To date, they’ve produced about 300 written features and nearly 200 podcast episodes.

The goal is not just to cut through the noise, but to create templates and precedents for other would-be impact projects – and to do that without mirroring the inequalities he saw in the traditional nonprofit world.

“We've been almost entirely grant funded (the project has also received $2,500 through sponsorships and about $1,000 from community contributions), and that's intentional,” he said. “I've had folks approach me about monetizing through subscription models, but I want it to be accessible, especially to nonprofits that are smaller – that don't have those large teams or the funds to put into these things.” 

Read more: Crypto for Good: How Glo Dollar Plans to Use a Stablecoin to Help End Extreme Poverty

Simon recently on-boarded his first paid contributor, Tereza Bízková, who’s supporting communications and an ongoing rebrand. They’re also building “a web3 toolkit for nonprofits,” which, across 10 learning modules, will cover everything from crypto philanthropy to decentralized governance to impact tokenization, monitoring and evaluation. There will be case studies and a resource library – “all those things that help nonprofits cut through that noise,” he said.

Supplemental to that will be B Corp-styled certification for nonprofits, where organizations that complete the toolkit course earn non-fungible token (NFTs) certificates. On-chain reputation systems and tracking that incentivizes more projects to prioritize impact are additional pursuits.

Simon is also dedicated to tracking Crypto Altruism’s own impact, and plans to implement accountability tools like Karma GAP and hypercerts to guarantee their activities are transparent. He understands that, for a platform focused on amplifying others, it’s essential to illuminate the process behind who gets featured. Ponzi schemes, ransomware attacks, conflicts of interest and other deceits do occur in web3, after all. “My worst nightmare is interviewing a guest that somehow fools us and is a bad actor,” he said. 

Simon seeks projects already creating “real world impact,” relying on recommendations from his network and his own due diligence to confirm the platform isn’t promoting “vaporware that just sprung up overnight.” And there’s no paid content – “[Crypto Altruism] is not a shilling podcast,” he stressed. 

The guiding principle to date has really been demonstrable track records of “lowering the barrier” and “helping folks.” Before the end of the year, to ensure that remains the case, he plans to formalize a rubric that verifies would-be guests are ticking all the boxes.

The most recent Crypto Altruism episode features the Shamba Network, “an anticipatory cash transfer program for pastoralists in Kenya,” Simon explained. In Kenya, climate change vulnerability is intensifying financial risks for communities that already have limited access to financial services.

Shamba tracks ecological data from over 30 free satellite databases. That information is brought on-chain via an oracle, and if conditions degrade for individual farmers, it will trigger smart contracts that automatically pay out climate insurance. The project’s founder says it can lower climate insurance costs by up to 40 percent.

“[The payments] go instantaneously instead of having to take days and go through different intermediaries,” Simon said, excitedly. “That to me was such a cool project. It really checked a lot of those boxes, you know?”

lead image: Drew Simon