On 6 February 2023, two violent earthquakes hit southeast Turkey. The country declared emergency state and asking for help from the international community.

Times of crisis like this require great coordination to heal the wounds of such disasters. The Law in Turkey clearly defines the rules of collecting donations and that charitable activities may only be conducted by the State or accredited NGOs. However, as it is again not very clear for how to collect donations through cryptocurrencies, thanks to the efforts of Turkiye Relief DAO, the NGOs and the State Institutions were given exceptions by MASAK (Financial Crimes Investigation Board of Turkiye) to be able to open crypto wallets in order to facilitate international donations through blockchain.

As most of the NGOs are not crypto-natives, they were only able to create wallets on specific chains. And people who had assets on rollups or other side-chains had to bridge their assets to these chains to be able to send funds to the earthquake relief efforts. Hence, a necessity was born to make it way easier for those people to be able to directly donate, to make the UX of donations way more easier and convenient.

In light of these, through coordination, Connext, Optimism, Turkey Relief DAO, Salus Security, Go Plus Security, Macro joined forces to make xDonation a reality!

What Exactly is xDonation?

The xDonation contract is a simple smart contract designed to help NGOs accept donations across multiple chains.

It is designed to allow anyone to donate funds, regardless of what chain they are on. Donors are able to send funds to the contract, and a whitelisted sweeper (in the terminology of the contract) is able to just sweep all the assets in the contract. In this sweep transaction, the assets in the contract are first swapped to the allowed assets for donation (typically stablecoins) and then bridged directly to the chain where the accreddited NGOs have been able to open wallets.

Coordination

Ensuring the security of the project was one of the most important issues. So how did we coordinate? Let’s listen how the spark turned into fire.

Atakan from GoPlus Security:

Coordinating the audit party was kinda strange duty, I must admit. I was on my way back to Istanbul from Tel Aviv. In the mean time I was following the smart contract development process from Telegram. Then we realized that we will need an audit report. I work in web3 security and connected to many auditing companies but finding an auditor in the middle of the night from airport, was not a part of my daily routine 😄 I started to text my friends from Hacken, Veridise, Slowmist and also our co-founder Eskil. (Many thanks to them for their help offers!)

I explained the situation and goal of the project. Afterwards, our partner Mirror from Salus Security reached me with the help of Eskil. They said that they would be happy to contribute to such a meaningful project like that. In parallel, my friend Baran from Macro Security was working on another report. We ended up having two audit report for our beloved project, in less than one day.

Now that everything is ready, we started the announcements on the marketing side. Firstly Connext Network, Optimisim and Arbitrum made a call to their communities and directed them to the relief fund.

How Did xDonation Help?

So far, the amount of funds sent through xDonation contract has already exceeded $40K on Arbitrum and Optimism alone. As it has also coincided with the second airdrop of $OP tokens, we can expect the number to go up.

Once and for all

We would like to once again offer our gratitude to everyone showing amazing efforts of coordination to make this possible. Kudos to Connext, Optimism, Turkey Relief DAO, Salus Security, Go Plus Security, Macro

You also have the option to mint this post as an NFT. Any revenue generated will be divided equally between Ahbap and Anka Relief, and we will provide Etherscan links as proof of the funds being transferred to these organizations.