we already tried not just once but twice, the third must be a charm :´)
Stripe was beautiful but didn’t want us (I’m still hurt), Transak/Torus/Ramp were functional but way too complicated and didn’t bring much value (also everybody hates extra KYC). But finally the SDG may be our solution to allow users donate with fiat (credit / debit cards) and for projects to receive money to their bank accounts.
The SDG impact fund has been our good friend since the beginning, I remember my first payments in Giveth were made through it and I got my salary in fiat until I decided to go full crypto. While we transition and the world knows blockchain technology and crypto better, we could bring more users, those users that only know the traditional way of money.
We have a couple of difficulties to solve. First problem is allowing donors to GIVe money using fiat, second problem is allowing project owners to receive funds in fiat. Let’s get into more details
1. Allowing donations with fiat: this part is easy, we already have an account with the SDG, every donation would arrive here using donorbox or an embedded solution to grab credit or debit card payments - on our records we have to keep track of every cent that should go to every project and done! Technically we don’t have much of a problem in here. 2. Allowing projects to cash out with fiat: From our SDG account we have to distribute the money to their real owners, this is not so easy, but quoting @snappysnap… “from a compliance standpoint the SDG can “distribute” funds in 4 different ways:
1) A grant (must go to a qualified nonprofit)
2) An investment (think like buying stocks or equity)
3) A MRI or mission related “investment” (goes to a for-profit entity)
4) Paying a contractual obligation (think an individual or company submits an invoice).”
SO, What’s it gonna be!? Each project owner will have their own necessity and we should also have a preference on doing this without much complication. It’s our job to find the best route for both Giveth and project owners. I’m very curious to listen everyone’s thoughts and get the best out of this. Please comment below!
I’m making this post to find out what’s the best UX so we can start building it together.
Also a question, do you think it’s worth to bring fiat donations to our platform?
Yes, lots of value here
Nah, waste of time
0voters
Here some historical content that I believe are now memes
Could be a revenue stream… we could add a fee on top of what SDG charges (5%) but what is cool is the donor would get a tax receipt, which would need to be added to the platform.
We could give our user the option of a tax receipt or GIVbacks… complicated scope here.
I think the fees would be so high (5% + credit card fees + our fee) that it might not be welcomed by users…
and then there is the fact that we have to store all these project’s bank info…
and then there is the fact that getting SDG impact to send money all over the world might incur even more fees on the project and be a coordination nightmare.
I think this is a HUGE project. lot’s of scope to tackle, I am leaning towards it being a waste of time… hope other comments can prove me wrong.
I see a lot of value for makers that have not traditionally focus on crypto assets. The infamous FIAT integration may convince them to focus their attention to use Giveth as their main donation platform, getting to know better cryptodonors, while maintaining or even transition their donation base.
But I agree that the SDG fee + credit card fee + our fee could be too high.
Have we explore Mt Pelerin? I know Honeyswap use it to onboard credit card directly to Gnosis network, but only applies to US, EU & Japan.
Another option could be to make this a bounty and get someone that is specialized in this to deliver a ready-made solution.
But I do consider this would be extremely valuable to meet Givers & Makers where they are and grow Giveth users.
Thanks, @mateodaza for initiating the discussions.
My intention from this forum post was not seeking to jump to it or not, but understanding the flow and the risks better. However in order to say Yes or No, I can say it depends on:
time to market
effort / costs
relative value in comparison with what we have on the roadmap
to consider all of them:
Due to our limited active users and their persona, I think fiat only makes sense in high peek of growth, it’s not the time fit for us though, also we have t compete with giants web2 crowdfunding platforms which is not our game.
Due to @Griff 's comment, we have to meet lots of scopes and it makes it costly in Dev and risky on the operational side, I can say for sure it’s not scalable with more than 1K users, we need a separate operation team.
There are models like Kano and MoSCow or ICE scoring, and I can see lots of valuable things on the roadmap in comparison with their value/cost/chance of success, I can not say taking this one is a priority.
I second what MoeNick said. I assume that allowing fiat donations cannot go without the second part of accepting fiat donations, right? Otherwise, I’d vote for implementing just the donor side of fiat thing.
Would love to see this become a reality as it eases the transition into crypto and Web3, to Cotabe’s point but can see that it mixes/dilutes the Giveth Web3 message.
And, I suspect any solution will require a lot of additional admin through tracking and monitoring the donation flow right through to project cashing-out, possibly large volumes of small value and ultimately risks and regulation around storing bank account data.
Following the thread to learn more about what’s involved before voting.
Here’s one I’ve come across: Givingway (platform that supports projects in emerging economies and accepts both fiat and crypto) - fees for fiat donation are 7% handling fee and 3% payment processor fee.
“Competitors” are offering fiat on/off ramp, short term we can play along the market game, long term everyone will be crypto native, we’re winning there already
Allow FIAT donations, whatever the fee for CC processing, show they can donate with 0% fee with crypto and get GIVbacks AND use the opportunity to onboard them (create a wallet etc.)
Tax deduction for donations is something donors might be interested in
We don’t want to defeat the purpose of the GIVeconomy and everything else we’re planning to release in the future
Short term we can respond to market trends with an easy solution, long term we can’t (time, cost) and shouldn’t compete with others (defeating our purpose). They will or should start competing with us and our web3 features.
Marko makes some great points! There might be a cheaper options worth considering tho… Met someone at devcon and @mateodaza has their API to play with.
It seems like a pretty good low-fee system that will even allow people to onramp to gnosis chain. I’m sending their form link to @mateodaza to fill out
Complex issue, but I agree this is a business decision and not philosophical (“the Giveth message”). It would not make sense to pass up the opportunity, if it arose under the tough constraints, to invite fiat to the platform. That said, I agree with @MoeNick and others that it is currently not a good business decision based on all those constraints and limitations.
In any case, I want to emphasize the idea that inviting fiat to Giveth does not diminish its philosophy and mission. One of my main worries for Giveth overall is that it does not yet appear to be reaching the audience it needs to survive, and sticking to a conservative interpretation of the mission cannot fix that. Rolling with the punches and innovating will, even if that appears like a step backwards. But fiat is not a step backwards. It’s just opening the door wider.
I have a question @MoeNick about your comment “compete with giants web2 crowdfunding platforms which is not our game.” Should it be? Or is that what you mean about “high peak of growth”? How do we get there if we don’t incorporate fiat?
Q’s for @markop : What do you mean “short term we can play along the market game, long term everyone will be crypto native…”? Do you mean we can/should incorporate fiat to compete? But that in the future of the world as a whole, everyone will be born into the new crypto world? I would agree, if so.
I do think appealing to tax write-offs sounds like a good business decision considering the “nonprof” market we are trying to be part of.
We are not defeating the purpose of the GIVeconomy by inviting fiat. Also, again, of course we have our mission and will always retain it, but I don’t think we can be so staunch in interpreted belief that we overlook future survival and progress.
This is a very experimental and complex feature so for now on development we’ll start working on 2 main flows, in the future we will expand:
SDG donations pilot: Let’s start receiving fiat donations as an organization (the giveth project), while we discover what’s the best UX, then we will bring the option to all other projects on our platform
Onramper Integration: Let’s allow users to buy crypto directly to the project’s wallet. Onramper is a great solution which keeps many on ramping solutions in one widget (Moonpay, Wyre, Xanpool, Mercuryo, Coinify, Indacoin, Utorg, Transak
and Itez for now)
As an extra, I’m on discussion with the team of afrus, they help organizations to get donations on Latinamerica, they work as an app to manage donations but only on fiat but they are very interested in bringing crypto aand they love Giveth, we could piggyback on their fiat donations feature and they could use us for crypto. As soon as I have the ideas more clear and how feasible it is, we’ll start planning
hey team!
I see there is already a huge lengthy discussion here so I’ll try to keep my 2 cents on the topic very short.
The main reason why I am here (and I would vote YES for this integration) is that we potentially can get a grant from Radicle who can help us with the research phase of integrating web2 into our tech.
They are keen to bridge the gap from web2 > web3. Our initial ask was to integrate their Drips to stream donations to projects. They are 100% interested to try this with us but also for the Credit Card donations. It may be useful to involve them in this research and understand how we can overcome all the hurdles together; especially that we can get a grant for it too!
Secondly, I completely agree with Marko that we do not need to make this a competition with our web3 features. but simply treat it as a hook to convert the mindset into crypto donation and educate the users about the advantages we have.
@mateodaza it seems you are already deep in the research and understanding of the possibilities here. I would like to follow up with Radicle with this project in mind and understand how we can work together on a fair price for the research phase to make it work. I’ll ping you on Discord to talk about it more.
Super amazing discussions already Great point about Radicle @yass that’s exciting! and yes we have to consider the complexity, time, cost and effort involved as per @MoeNick 's point.
One thing I wanted to echo and elaborate on was @Suga’s point about opening the door wider by accepting fiat donations. I totally and agree and also think this is how we can move beyond retail to have a bigger possibility of capturing large donors on the platform …as they would definitely be interested in tax deduction. It’s the foot in the door. Opening up the possibility for higher net worth donors and institutions would be a great thing for Giveth.
Onramper integration coming very soon, got a bit delayed because of a webhook key we need to keep track of those purchases on our database, we still need ux feedback from our designers and we’re ready to test
From the SDG i finally got to meet with Bryan, I’ll be adding the “donor box” widget only for the Giveth Project, we’re still figuring out how to connect our backends to keep in sync with those donations that arrive to our account. While that’s solved, we can start discussing on what to do with the fiat that the project gets, one way that occurs to me is to partner with on ramping services like Mt Pelerin to buy stables at a good price (I recently found out they have the best % to offer) and send that to the project and then maybe encourage to get $GIV through GIVbacks or by exchanging. This just occurred to me and would love to start contact with them to see how feasible this is, I know ShapeShift (@willy knows ) and Honeyswap have partnered with them already. I’ll push it if you guys like the idea! Fiat2Crypto sounds like a great idea and as we discussed on the gov call, it doesn’t make sense to do Fiat2Fiat, Fiat should only serve as a vessel to bring more people to web3. let me know what you think.
Radicle Drips met with @yass and this is such a great opportunity, will bring more info when we discuss it more with the radicle team
I agree - we don’t really meet any of our goals by simply offering a fiat2fiat donating platform. Donors are totally removed from the GIVeconomy and most of our core roadmap features thus.
Got in touch with Mt Pelerin and they are not able legally to sell us stable coins for the donations that we’d be holding to the projects on the SDG account - I guess that we could make an agreement with users explaining what we’d do with that money but I think it’s not worth it, in the end is better for them to just use Onramper and handle the same flow.
So, I’d say that we remove the SDG projects from scope and just keep the donorbox for ourselves. I’ll focus still on Onramper and Radicle Drips, maybe is a better idea to allow a credit/debit card payment to fill a Drip source.
) and Honeyswap have partnered with them already. I’ll push it if you guys like the idea! Fiat2Crypto sounds like a great idea and as we discussed on the gov call, it doesn’t make sense to do Fiat2Fiat, Fiat should only serve as a vessel to bring more people to web3. let me know what you think.