How blockchain based solutions can help in relief campaigns and charity drives

Dr Vin Menon
4 min readMar 14, 2023

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Are you a regular donor in a charitable organization? If yes, then how do you track if your funds are being used for exactly what is stated?

A lot of people like you donate their hard earned money to various charities and NGOs. However, it’s undeniable that these sorts of organizations have a long history of being undercover scammers. One of the biggest reasons for this is the lack of transparency between the charitable organizations and the donors.

To boost the transparency factor and streamline the entire donation process, blockchain technology can become an important tool in charities and relief campaigns. Using the transparent model of a blockchain and a highly secure network on top of that, donors can get complete information related to where their funds are needed. Using smart contracts, donors can even ensure their donated amount is going where they want it to go.

There are several other benefits of using blockchain in relief campaigns and charity drives. Let’s try to understand how blockchain based solutions help us out here!

How Can blockchain based Solutions Help in Relief Campaigns and Charity Drives?

A blockchain is a continuous network of blocks which record transactions and other information, and secure it all with cryptography. Let’s see how blockchain based solutions help relief campaigns and charity drives:

  • For a NGO, a distributed ledger from blockchain based solutions can be used to record all the incoming donations for specific purposes.
  • Donors get the record of their donation being added to a blockchain, and they can easily track the donations on the blockchain.
  • Moreover, there is no middleman through which the donations have to be passed. So this reduces the chances of fraud or even hackers taking away the money.
  • A blockchain is immutable. So, even if a person tries to alter the information on a block by any means, the hash information of the altered block will not match with the previous and subsequent blocks, which would alert all network participants of an interference.

Quicker Transactions

blockchain based solutions facilitate transactions quicker than fiat finance, especially in the case of cross border transactions. Blockchain technology helps in easily transferring the funds from one account to another. The reduction of middlemen makes the whole process faster and much more efficient than the normal banking system.

Tracking The Donations

Source / Use of distributed ledger in tracking donations

On top of blockchain-powered decentralized finance making transactions to any distance easier and faster than ever, the greatest benefit blockchains bring to relief campaigns and charity drives is the traceability of funds. Since all the transactions on a blockchain are recorded publicly and notified to the participants, no charitable organizations can try to funnel the donations to line the pockets of the management. All donations can be tracked by the donors with blockchain based solutions and they can have complete knowledge of where they are helping people.

Improving Transparency

Traditionally, whenever you donate to a regular non profit organization, you have to put your faith in them. You have to trust that they will actually use your funds in relief campaigns or charity drives. Blockchain technology renders this trust unnecessary.

On blockchain based solutions, donors can track their transactions and where they are going, as mentioned above, just by joining the network as a node. Alternatively, they can ask an existing node for complete records. This way, blockchain brings trustlessness, which can encourage yet more people to take part in charity work.

Conclusion

In conclusion, blockchain based solutions can bring a lot more efficiency and faith in relief campaigns and charity drives, and ultimately send in help faster to any affected areas. Improving the transparency and providing fortification to the transfer of funds promotes trust among all donors.

The blockchain technology has long since spilled out of just decentralized finance and found dynamic use cases across industries, and charity drives is just another sector where blockchain can add value. We do hope this post helps you understand how blockchains can be a great help in relief campaigns and charity drives!

Would you like to read more about blockchains and the world of crypto? You can head over to my blog for more such articles!

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Dr Vin Menon

A blockchain enthusiast and entrepreneur’s musings on the next big revolution since the Internet.