The charity giant Fidelity Charitable Fund has started accepting donations in bitcoin via Coinbase. The move is explained by donors' enquiries about the option to donate in bitcoin.

Fidelity, the largest donor-advised fund by assets and the second largest charity in the US, was founded in 1991. It currently works with over 100,000 donors to support more than 200,000 charities.

“At this point, we’re looking to gauge the interest in funding philanthropy with bitcoin and learn from that,” says Matt Nash, senior vice president of donor engagement for Fidelity Charitable.

Coinbase provides Fidelity Charitable with its email invoicing tool for merchants. It allows users to request payment for a specific amount from a customer. Coinbase offers donation processing free of charge, both for charities and donors.

Recently Dan Corry, Chief Executive of New Philanthropy Capital, made a prognosis that alternative finance models will be massively adopted by charities in the areas traditionally funded by the government. The non-profit corporation Mozilla Foundation partnered with Coinbase to accept bitcoin donations in response to user demand.

In May 2015 the UK-based Charities Aid Foundation, published a report exploring both benefits and drawbacks of cryptocurrencies for charity organisations. The conclusion was that working with cryptocurrencies is not an easy task for charities and the benefits do not seem obvious because of comparably low level of bitcoin donations. However, sooner or later, some version of digital currency will become mainstream, and all the questions that rise now will become really urgent.

Sonya Belova