May Edition of the Crypto Altruists Newsletter

👋Hello, Crypto Altruists!

For us, it's values season.

Google hired a philosopher. The Ethereum Foundation published a new mandate built around explicit principles. People are writing fiction about better futures and redesigning governance systems from scratch. The Long Now Foundation launched a lab series exploring how frontier technologies are reshaping our sense of time, truth, and interspecies coexistence.

Maybe it's subjective... Consensus in Miami just wrapped, and the vibe there was different (that's a story for another newsletter 🙈). But the EthPrague talks just dropped, and honestly, we know where we'd rather be.

Drew's episode 250 is a good place to start if you want to understand why we do this. Five frontlines where crypto is functioning as real humanitarian infrastructure. Worth a listen.

Here's what we've been paying attention to this month. 👇

🌱 Featured: Ivan's story is a video episode

One of the things we love most about this work is that it keeps pushing us in new directions (did you know we're now on TikTok? 👀). And this month, we hit a milestone we're really proud of: our first-ever video episode.

Ivan's Story: A Ukrainian Veteran's Journey from Blindness to Hope follows Ivan, a 20-year-old Ukrainian veteran who lost his sight in a mortar attack on the front lines in December 2022.

The video features Tetiana of Alliance for Public Health, who introduces the Touchpoint rehabilitation program that the organization built to serve veterans like Ivan. And it asks a question we've been sitting with for a while: the crypto community showed up for Ukraine in 2022 in historic ways. Four years later, the headlines have faded. What do we do now?

"My life is hardly any different from a regular person's life. I work, I'm trying to grow my own business. I go fishing. My life is hardly any different from a non-blind person." — Ivan

This is one of the most moving things we've made. If it resonates with you, Alliance for Public Health has an active fundraising campaign on Endaoment to fund the next cohort of the Touchpoint program, up to 20 veterans who are still waiting for their chance to rebuild.

Every donation helps, in crypto or fiat. 💛💙

💡 May impact spotlight

Ecosystem developments 🚀

• Mercy Corps Ventures pilots privacy-preserving aid payments in Colombia: The six-month pilot will deliver stablecoin cash transfers to 300 displaced people using zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic method that confirms aid eligibility without storing or exposing personal data.
• Celo goes live on Bridge, Stripe's stablecoin platform: Bridge has added support for Celo, a blockchain with 15 million users already making everyday stablecoin payments across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America.
• Mercy Corps Ventures shares results of its blockchain cash transfer pilot in Kenya: Smart contracts triggered automatic drought payouts to pastoralist communities, cutting settlement times from 7-10 days to under 6 hours and lifting three-meals-per-day consumption from 13% to 77%.
• Gitcoin moves treasury funds into Octant v2: This way, Gitcoin aims to fund grants from staking returns rather than spending down its reserves — keeping the principal intact while sustaining its grants program long-term.
• Ripple shares results of its $25M education donation, one year on: The grant, mostly delivered in RLUSD (Ripple's stablecoin), funded over 48,000 classroom projects across all 50 US states and supported 2,300 new teachers reaching more than 140,000 students.
• MiniPay launches $1M grant programme for Mini App builders: Grants are tied to real transaction activity rather than pitches or proposals, with a global roadshow to recruit local developers across emerging markets.
• Metagov launches the Protopian Prize, a fiction contest about humanity's future: Two prize categories (AI for public benefit and democratic futures) at $3,000 each, with submissions open May 1-July 31.
• Edge City is running a live human-AI coordination experiment at its May popup village: Every attendee at Edge Esmeralda 2026 will get a personal AI agent to help navigate schedules, make introductions, and participate in governance decisions on their behalf.
• Ethereum Foundation launches Project Odin to help public goods projects achieve funding sustainability: The program embeds strategic advisors with critical Ethereum infrastructure teams to help them diversify beyond single grant dependencies before they hit a funding crisis.
• GoodDollar Completes Nine-Week Governance Redesign: Governance Lead Sam McCarthy shares what the process revealed, and why the hardest problems in DAOs are social, not technical.
• MiniPay users can now buy tokenized gold through Squid: The stablecoin wallet with users across 66 countries has partnered with Squid to let users buy tokenized gold (digital gold backed by real gold) from as little as $1, with over 88,000 people making purchases since launch.
• World ID partners with Tinder, Zoom, and Docusign despite global pushback: Sam Altman's iris-scanning identity project has been banned or investigated in over a dozen countries for privacy violations, but is finding a warmer reception among US companies looking to verify users.

Crypto Altruists content & updates 💚

• 📊 Infographic: The State of AI for Nonprofits in 2026: Nonprofit AI adoption jumped from 31% to 92% in a year, but only 7% report major impact.
• 🎙️ Crypto Altruists Episode 247: Beyond the Crisis Response — Building Lasting Support for Ukraine in Web3: Four years in, donor attention has faded, but the need hasn't. We explore how Web3 can build lasting support infrastructure for Ukraine with the Alliance for Public Health.
• 📊 Infographic: Web3 for Nonprofits — 6 Tools Transforming How Organizations Fundraise and Operate: A practical overview of six blockchain tools helping nonprofits accept crypto donations, send cross-border payments, and prove impact onchain.
• 🎙️ Crypto Altruists Episode 248: From Local Hubs to Global Hackathon: Solène Daviaud of Dev3pack on how their network of 50+ local hubs and their Global Hackathon are making Web3 and AI more accessible for women, students, and first-time builders.
• 🎙️ Crypto Altruists Episode 249: 2,000 Years of Decentralized Coordination: Alinagwe Mwaselela of JUKUMU TZ on working with nearly 300 savings circles in Tanzania and what Web3 can learn from communities that have been practicing decentralized coordination for millennia.
• 🎙️ Crypto Altruists Episode 250: The Quiet Revolution: Drew's milestone 250th episode — a guided tour of five frontlines where crypto is functioning as real humanitarian infrastructure, from anticipatory aid to parallel economies under authoritarian regimes.

Insightful resources 📖

• The Ethereum Page: A cleanly designed map of Ethereum resources, from the basics to institutional deep dives, useful whether you're just getting started or looking for a single place to point someone to.
• Why AI Alone Cannot Fix Social Problems: A Cornell research team studied eight AI deployments across the developing world and found the same pattern each time: the technology only worked where strong human and institutional support already existed.
• World Development Report 2026: Artificial Intelligence for Development: The World Bank's flagship annual report examines AI's potential for developing countries and the risks of it widening the gap between rich and poor nations.
• AI Fluency for Nonprofits: A free course from Anthropic and GivingTuesday helping nonprofit staff build practical AI skills, with a certificate of completion upon finishing.

🌟 Project highlight: Bread Stacks

Savings circles have existed for over 2,000 years. A group of people pool a fixed amount of money at regular intervals, and the full pot rotates to one member at a time until everyone has had a turn. No banks, no interest, no credit checks. Only trust and mutual commitment.

You probably know them by a different name: tandas in Mexico, susus in the Caribbean, chamas in East Africa, chit funds in India. Researchers and aid organizations often use the umbrella term ROSCAs (Rotating Savings and Credit Associations). The World Bank estimates these systems handle over $500 billion globally every year.

Bread Stacks is what happens when you take that tradition onchain. Built by Bread Cooperative, a worker-led nonprofit building financial tools for communities rather than shareholders, it brings savings circles to the blockchain, making them accessible across borders with transparent records and automated contributions and payouts through smart contracts.

While the Stacks app is still in active development, we're excited about the idea of participants building an onchain credit history that can be exported to credit bureaus, helping those who have never had access to formal lending start building a financial track record. Philanthropic organizations and employers can also plug in matching funds to incentivize savings within specific communities.

Why it matters for the impact space: financial inclusion tools don't have to be invented from scratch. Some of the most resilient ones already exist. Bread Stacks is a rare example of Web3 technology showing up in service of something communities have already proven works for millennia.

💡 Bring web3 into your nonprofit's mission

Crypto Altruists works with nonprofits, foundations, and impact teams that want to understand if blockchain is useful for their work. We help with things like crypto donations, transparency tools, and practical web3 experiments.

Our consulting and workshops are hands-on, clear, and tailored to your reality. Book a call if you want to explore what makes sense for your work. 🤝

📬 Stay connected

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See you in the next edition! 💚