Fintech and the Giving Season (Year 3)

Plus, new funds for an old peer-to-peer lender.

Number of the Week: 60 cents (explanation below)

Fintech and the Giving Season (Year 3)

This is FIN’s third year of writing about fintech and giving, and seeing the technological leaps that are always abundant, you might expect that progress would be linear. After all, in early 2022, within a few days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, tens of millions of dollars worth of donations zapped to Ukraine in cryptocurrency, primarily Bitcoin but also other cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which seemed to set a new baseline for digital charity.

But progress is never quite that simple. Late 2021 and early 2022 turn out to have been the peak for many digital asset markets; the Terra/LUNA fiasco and the meltdown of FTX, among other factors, have erased trillions of dollars in digital value in a matter of months. Most large cryptocurrencies are trading at or near two-year lows, and the monthly volume of NFTs being traded is currently down about 90 percent from January, according to the tracking company Dune:

These profound market plunges have a direct impact on how charitable donations take place. Here is what the landscape looks like: