The Charity Sector Is Breaking. Can Ethereum Help Fix It?

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Speaker: James Newell

Type: Lightning Talk

Expertise: Some familiarity with the topic

Event: Devcon

Date: Nov 2026

Charities are watching their funding model collapse. In 2025 the US terminated 86% of USAID's programs, cancelling over $75 billion in awards. The UK is cutting aid to 0.3% of GNI by 2027, its lowest level in decades. The grant cycles and institutional funders the sector has relied on are proving less durable than assumed. Ethereum has spent years building funding infrastructure for a related problem: sustaining public goods that benefit everyone and are owned by no one. Quadratic funding, retroactive funding, DAO treasuries, and stablecoin transfers were built for open source, and remain largely untested for charities: regulatory reporting, beneficiary trust, and donors who have never held a wallet. Having spent 20 years in the charity sector and four leading one of the most significant crypto-centric grantmakers, I will show where these onchain mechanisms solve a real problem, where they don't yet, and what it would take a regulator, a foundation, or a rural NGO to trust them.