Canada’s largest donation and fundraising platform will now accept cryptocurrency donations for any of the country’s 86,000 registered charities, a move it hopes will close a ‘giving gap’ between older and younger donors.

As of May 18, donors will be able to give a donation of either Bitcoin or Ethereum to any charity listed on CanadaHelps. The platform said it will then immediately sell the crypto donation for Canadian dollars, send the donor a charitable tax receipt, and then disburse the donation to the charity in question. Because CanadaHelps creates a page for every registered charity in the CRA’s database, it will allow any of Canada’s 86,000 charities to receive donations through the platform. 

Some charities such as Pathways to Education, a national charity that helps low-income youth transition to post-secondary education, already accept crypto donations, but Jane Ricciardelli, acting CEO of CanadaHelps, says the platform’s announcement is a major step forward for crypto in the charitable sector. 

“There are some select charities who are a bit ahead of the curve, but not at the scale that we’re going to be doing this,” she told Future of Good in an interview. 

Crypto is currently emerging from a Black Tuesday moment: in early May, the international crypto market lost an eye-watering $200 billion in value. Cryptocurrency is routinely criticized for its incredible volatility and unpredictability, as well as its lack of regulatory oversight when compared to stocks, bonds, and other securities. 

Yet CanadaHelps believes crypto is a way to bring in more funds for charities, especially from younger donors, at a time when Canadians under the age of 55 are giving less than their older counterparts. Meanwhile, according to a KPMG survey cited by CanadaHelps, roughly a quarter of Canadians aged 18 to 24 own crypto assets. 

“These are the people who are benefiting from the wealth that’s been generated through crypto,” Ricciardelli said. “We’re seeing this as an opportunity for them to take an asset that they own and donate to charities — share some of this wealth.”  

Will opening up crypto donations actually boost the charitable giving of younger Canadians? Ricciardelli said it isn’t clear at the moment, although she said donors and charities have both asked about the possibility of crypto donations over the past year. 

CanadaHelps’s new system may solve one of the problems charities face when trying to accept crypto. As Mark Blumberg, a Toronto charity lawyer, wrote in a January 2022 blog post on the subject: “One of the biggest misunderstandings related to cryptocurrency is that some people think it is a currency,” he wrote. “When it is being donated to a charity it’s actually considered by CRA to be a gift-in-kind and therefore all the rules that apply to gifts-in-kind including the deemed fair market values, apply to cryptocurrency.”

In a nutshell, issuing a tax receipt for a ‘’gift-in-kind’ – or a non-cash gift – requires a charity to evaluate it for its ‘deemed fair market value’ (the best price it would fetch) before issuing a donation receipt. Blumberg explained that the CRA could invalidate a donation’s tax receipt if a charity gets the deemed fair market value rules of a gift-in-kind wrong.

Because CanadaHelps immediately converts a donation of crypto to cash, Ricciardelli said, the fair market value of a crypto donation can be established immediately. “The minute the crypto comes into our wallet, we sell it right away for cash,” she said. The platform then takes a fee for the donation: anywhere from 2 percent to 3 percent of the total donation, depending on its size.

In fact, Ricciardelli said, CanadaHelps’s process for crypto is quite similar to how it has handled donations of mutual funds and stocks since 2008. “The donation is made to us, we sell the security as soon as possible, and then we disburse the donation to the charity,” she explained. 

CanadaHelps also wants to offset any carbon emissions caused by crypto donations on its platform through a partnership with CarbonX, an environmental fintech company working on emissions analysis and carbon trading. The company is also donating enough carbon credits to offset 100 megatonnes of CO2.

The first organization to receive a crypto donation through CanadaHelps will be Canada Learning Code, a national charity that teaches digital skills. It’ll be given by Boris Wertz, a board member of Canada Learning Code and the founder of Version One Ventures. 

“I am thrilled that CanadaHelps has made donating cryptocurrency possible for Canadian charities, a technology that is so important to the future of philanthropy,” Wertz said in a statement. 

While international crypto markets remain a rollercoaster, Ricciardelli said they are recovering — and CanadaHelps’s decision to dive into crypto isn’t a short-term initiative. “We have the long-term view on this.” 

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