Greenpeace is taking advantage of the cost-saving potential of accepting bitcoin donations as the crypto-currency becomes more widely used.
The environmental campaign organisation has announced that it will start accepting bitcoin donations in its USA division via payment processor Bitpay.
Greenpeace only accepts donations from individuals, not corporations or governments. The cost of these individual, small transactions quickly add up because credit card companies still generally charge nonprofits the same transaction fees as corporations.
Bitpay and other payments providers do not charge nonprofits any fees, meaning that the entire donation can be made use of by the charity.
Other charities and non-profit organisations have already discovered the benefits of bitcoin. Earlier this month, United Way Worldwide, which raised $5bn last year, became the biggest privately held charity to accept bitcoin via Coinbase. Wikipedia also accepts the crypto-currency.
While bitcoin use is still minute compared to credit and debit card transactions, giving its supporters more ways to donate can only help a charitable organisation. According to Blockchain, there have been around 70,000 bitcoin transactions so far today, whereas Visa and Mastercard handle tens of thousands a second. But the lack of transaction fees could start to make bitcoin a preferable way to donate to charity.
“The majority of our support comes from individual donations made by thousands of people across the country,” wrote Greenpeace blogger Cassady Sharp. “[This] mean[s] that we have to be constantly evolving to ensure that donors are able to support our important work in the way that’s most convenient for them.”
Whitepapers
Related reading
Travel industry must keep up with consumers’ payments demands
Payments providers must keep up with the fast-paced change of consumer demands in the travel sector, according to Kevin White, Mastercard’s director ... read more
Nissan joins in-car payments race
Payments services providers and fintechs have unleashed a flurry of collaborative innovations over the course of the past decade in order to ... read more
Ripple courting banks, paytech and big fintech to beat Swift to emerging markets
Midway into 2019, Ripple is broadening its clientbase in order to boost growth and capture emerging market volumes, according to Marcus Treacher, ... read more
UK SMEs need to embrace technology revolution
Modulr CEO Myles Stevenson and Seamus Smith, executive vice president of worldwide payments and banking for Sage, on why now is the time to embrace digitisation