This article was originally published on Medium by Robbie Heeger on Nov 4, 2021.
A Most Magical Time of Year
November is here, the seasons are shifting, the pandemic is lifting, and at Endaoment, our favorite time of year is upon us: Giving Season.
As crypto assets print new all-time highs and with digital collectibles fetching tens-of-millions of dollars at auction, it’s never been more important to find ways to share some of our newfound abundance with communities and organizations working tirelessly to make the world a better place.
We built Endaoment specifically for this purpose; making charitable giving of any digital asset as effortless, enjoyable, accessible, transparent and crypto-native as possible.
Today, we’re thrilled to be sharing our shiny new identity, along with a ground-up rewrite of our web application.
These changes are foundational for our continued evolution into the first decentralized, tax-compliant fully on-chain philanthropic institution. We think you’ll love the new feel & features.
A (Hugely) Upgraded Interface
We’ve spent the last several months rewriting our application. Increasing security, simplifying architecture, rethinking information hierarchy, designing our own components from scratch, and planning for our future roadmap.
The result: a beautiful, simplified, easy-to-use giving platform that effortlessly exposes rich information about what’s happening on-chain with our Fund and Organization contracts.
The “It’s Just a Squiggly Line” Fund on Endaoment’s new web client.
In addition to a refreshed look and feel, we’ve made it easier to search for Organizations by category, and are now integrating richer data about nonprofits’ spending, budgets and fundraising—thanks to GuideStar’s Premier API.
Our deep integration with Candid GuideStar offers rich organization profiles
What is most exciting about our new front-end tech stack is the foundation it gives us to begin chasing our roadmap in earnest. We can’t wait to take our platform to the next level as we expand upon this new codebase.
As we turn our attention to farmable & investable DAFs, on-chain Board of Directors meetings, fully-composable Fund and Org contracts, Philanthropic Prize Competitions, and Charitable Remainder Trusts, this new front-end framework will provide the building blocks we need for a more complete realization of our vision.
Up until today, Endaoment has been powered by a web client that was meant to serve as a proof-of-concept. It was pulled together using open-source frontends and component libraries, without our own deep thought into the design, iterative development capacity, or general user experience of the product.
That all changes today with our new client, and our growing team is chomping at the bit to push our offering forward.
One Year In: Crawl, Walk, Run.
Last October, we launched with very little idea of what the next year would hold in store for our team. We had an MVP and a dream, as they say. Last winter, we raised $300k in donations during giving season.
Endaoment’s smart contracts have raised more than $7 million for nonprofits.
This generosity from you, our small, but growing and engaged community, is no small feat. We wouldn’t be here without our amazing group of newly minted philanthropists.
Over the last year, we’ve made grant distributions to over 100 organizations, onboarded more than 200 nonprofits to Endaoment, and have had more than 80 Donor-Advised Funds giving out a a 60% clip—3x the national average for DAF deployment. We’ve expanded into Community Funds, facilitated marquee NFT fundraisers, fundraised for our future, expanded our team, and have begun work on decentralizing our Board of Directors under token powered governance.
We’ve demonstrated that we can facilitate on-chain donations at scale, without compromising on decentralization and innovation. Starting with small proofs-of-concept we’ve expanded into a multi-million dollar philanthropic institution, and we’re only just getting started.
In the coming months, we’re excited to bring you the features you’ve been requesting: investable and farmable Funds, full composable end addresses for Organizations, richer Organization data, full support for international giving, and so much more.
Endaoment is critical infrastructure for communicating the value and utility of crypto assets in our local communities. We hope you’ll join our blossoming community of philanthropists and help us spread the word about how crypto, philanthropy, and on-chain governance are a match made in heaven.