From Wallet to Well: What Happens to Your Crypto Donation
The question crypto donors ask us most often is what happens to their gift after they send it.
It’s converted to dollars, usually within the hour, and put toward a water project within days.
The first hour
You send from your own wallet in a single transaction. We never ask for your keys or seed phrase, and we don’t keep ongoing access to anything.
- Blockchain confirmation: ten to sixty minutes, depending on the network
- Receipt: issued automatically by our crypto processor as soon as your gift is received
- Conversion to dollars: as soon as it’s received
- In the field: within days
We keep a mapped pipeline of projects ready to start, so a gift that arrives on a Tuesday can have a drilling rig moving the following week.
If you’re giving more than $5,000, your tax advisor can tell you what documentation you’ll need.
Why we convert
We convert every gift as soon as it arrives.
We pay for each well in Kenyan shillings at the price on the day we drill, and that price changes over time. Converting right away locks in the value of your gift, so the project you funded gets built at the size you funded, regardless of what the market does afterward.
Where it lands
Your gift might fund a borehole drilled deep enough to hold water through the dry season, a spring protected from contaminated runoff, a sand dam that raises the water table across a valley, or rainwater catchment at a school where students currently leave class to fetch water.
Each project belongs to the community it serves. We form and train a water committee before construction starts, and local crews do the building. Once water is flowing, the committee manages daily operations and sets a tariff the community agrees on, with money set aside for repairs.
Our field teams continue to visit after handover, and we take on any repair the committee can’t manage, for as long as the water point is in service
Paying for that long-term care requires a permanent fund. We’ll cover it in the next post in this series.
How to check any of this
Every water point we monitor appears on a public dashboard with GPS coordinates, photos, and functionality status updated daily. More than 2,800 are under monitoring, and about 94% are currently flowing. Projects funded by crypto are tagged “Built with Crypto.”
The dashboard is public, so you can donate anonymously and still follow your project. If you do choose to give us your name, we’ll also send you personalized updates as the work progresses.
The track record
We started accepting Bitcoin in 2014, when few charities did. In 2017 we were one of the charities funded by the Pineapple Fund, and crypto has supported our work every year since.
Give crypto
We accept more than 100 cryptocurrencies. Your receipt is issued as soon as your gift is received, and your gift goes to work within days.
Donate crypto to The Water Project → thewaterproject.org/donate-crypto
Next in this series, November 18: The Fund that Pays for Year Ten.
Written by: Vanessa Sherwood
Senior Marketing & Communications Specialist
The Water Project
Other blogs by Vanessa:
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