Charity DAOs and a special look at UkraineDAO

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How does charitable fundraising work in Web3? Simple, easy, efficient, and transparent.

Since the emergence of DAOs, many of us have wondered as to the possibilities they can reach. Are they business organizations with gray legal status, a group of online people pooling their money together, a computer program with a wallet? What can a DAO even do without any centralized powers or leadership? 

We have seen that the answers to these questions expand as new DAOs are formed for various reasons. While some of these organizations offer a service to token holders, others act as politically minded fundraisers, such as the AssangeDAO (which supports embattled WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange) and ConstitutionDAO (which attempted to purchase an original copy of the U.S. Constitution at auction). 

Now we again see DAOs in news headlines, but this time for DAOs charitable donations. Charity DAOs such as UkraineDAO raises money for the purpose of donating proceeds to Ukrainian to aid the resistance following the entry of Russian armed forces into the country. 

UkraineDAO has raised money through its auction of a 1/1 NFT of the Ukrainian flag. The NFT sold for $6.75m and the proceeds were donated to Come Back Alive, a Ukrainian NGO (non-governmental organization) which distributes food, medical supplies, and necessary supplies to civilians and the Ukrainian military. Additionally UkraineDAO collected charitable donations in cryptocurrency from users who donated directly. 

UkraineDAO decided on using a PartyBid, a product by PartyDAO that allows users to “form a party, join forces, and buy NFTs as a team.” PartyBid allows users to connect their wallets on their website/app and send money to a party. Users were able to contribute to the sale of the Ukraine flag NFT and in return received $LOVE tokens proportional to their donations. According to UkraineDAO, the $LOVE token is a representational token for the user’s donation to their cause and is not a utility token.

What DAOs can accomplish is truly remarkable, UkraineDAO started as three individuals in Web3 who wanted to create a way to help people in Ukraine. The creation of the DAO and its partnership with PartyBid were relatively simple. UkraineDAO’s creators spread the word by building a website and using Discord and Twitter to grow their community. 

UkraineDAO shows us the ease and power of Web3 and charitable fundraising in Web3. Using Web3 individuals can come together from and form a DAO with prewritten code in a publicly viewable smart contract which assures prospective users of the organization's authenticity. 

Prospective individuals who have considered charitable or political fundraising are more empowered than ever with Web3. Using the Verse Network they can create a DAO for the purpose of collecting and distributing all proceeds to a charitable organization or a political cause of their choice. This requires no knowledge of computer code for the individual, simply a framework of governance (which Verse Network can build) as to how funds will be raised and what they are intended for. 

DAOs enable true peer to peer community fundraising. Many individuals today contribute to causes they wish to support on Web2 through centralized organizations such as GoFundMe and KickStarter. Even if the all proceeds go to their intended causes, these organizations still use traditional banking to transfer those funds, something that could take weeks in an active warzone. 

The funds can also be frozen by banks by government orders (as seen in Canada with Freedom Convoy 2022 and Russia with the SWIFT Russian bank freeze.) Additionally the Web 2 centralized organization can decide that it does not desire for your charitable or political cause to be funded (such as when GoFundMe decided to halt the Freedom Convoy’s GoFundMe Campaign, freezing $7.9M from reaching its intended cause. 

Charitable DAOs are an easy, simple, efficient, transparent, and secure way to raise funds as a community for a cause. We hope more causes turn to Web3 fundraising with the use of DAOs. Creating your own Charity DAO has never been easier using Verse Network, our all-in-one DAO building platform. 

About Verse

Verse is a censorship resistant, front running resistant, high performance, and interconnected cloud for next gen DAO and DeFi. It enables networks, developers and organizations to decentralize decision making effectively and scale their communities and decentralized applications.