Warning: The Cryptocoin Charity Craze is Hiding Something

Justin Hart
5 min readJun 1, 2021

In the 11th century Pope Urban II issued the earliest known “Indulgence” — a document certifying that a petitioner’s good actions in life would shorten the required penance beyond the grave for offenses they had committed. In short — you were paying the church for forgiveness of your sins. These penances allowed the Catholic church to increase its treasury and relieve its believers of much guilt. It became a pretty robust market and shakedown frankly.

1000 years later we find ourselves in a similar moral quandary: many upstart cryptocurrencies compensate for lack of any real world use case by giving to charity.

Copy of an indulgence issues by Pope Pius the XII

The hype-coin scene has given birth to a new slate of exciting “investment” vehicles. Some of these have distinct utility and other can be categorized as “meme coins” — coins which require a following to remain alive. This trend has also seen a host of tokens dedicate funds to charitable giving as a means to garner praise and support — but also, we assume, to truly give back.

ElonGate, Orfano, Happy, Save Planet Earth, Yummy, Word of Waves… the list goes on. Some coins choose charity as a side project others marry the…

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Justin Hart
Justin Hart

Written by Justin Hart

CMO at large. I live at the intersection of AI, machine learning and marketing. It’s a busy corner! (I need to model that).