Can Shiba Support Charity?

Author: Harshit Dugar

Last year, Vitalik Buterin had donated trillions of Shiba Inu tokens to Covid-hit India (worth $1 billion at the time) making what could easily be the largest-ever donation in the history of cryptocurrency!

Such an act helped to further spread the popularity of Shiba Inu and prove crypto to be more than just a fancy digital asset. With these facts at hand, the question is brought before us: can Shiba Inu continue to be used as a medium of charity and welfare-giving? Does it really have what it takes, or was the VB donation a one-time thing for Shib, a fleeting moment of glory, if you will, with nothing to follow in the future?

First, we need to understand the fact that when we utilize a cryptocurrency in the form of a medium of charity payments (or transfer payments for that matter) the coin must possess a few crucial traits: (1) low transaction fees, (2) low volatility, (3) large acceptability and last but not least (4) large trading volume.

Why these four traits, one might ask?

In layman’s terms, low transaction fees ensure the donation funds arrive to the beneficiary with the original number of figures (consider it a synonym of low shipping costs). Low volatility makes sure a million dollars worth of crypto being donated won’t shed half its value by the time it’s collected on the other side due to some overnight price dump (although at present low volatility is still rather a distant dream, than reality for most cryptocurrencies). Large acceptability coupled with a large trading volume basically makes the token in question easier to buy and sell.

All these facets come into play because ultimately, the cryptocurrency being donated first needs to be sold in order to fund the endeavor - sadly, fiat still remains the economic order of the world and is required for the charity or the cause to function. Putting Shiba into the perspective of these aspects, we can say that at present Shib has it about 50/50. On the bright side, we have one of the largest cryptocurrency communities in the world, where more and more people are accepting Shib as a medium of exchange for goods and services, a medium of gifting or tipping, and even a medium of trading. With greater acceptability comes greater trading volume, making it easier to buy or sell Shiba with lower spread.

On the downside, Shiba Inu remains plagued by high volatility (true for most crypto) as well as its unstable - and usually unfair - transaction fees. However, seeing as Shib is soon going to see its own L-2 blockchain network with near-zero gas fees, the token may yet become ideal for charity payments.

Nonetheless, Shib can already boast quite a number of charities that accept it. To name a few, they are: Save The Children, Cancer.org, American Cancer Society, the Water Project, United Way and of course, the Ukraine Government. Fact is almost all organizations that currently accept donations in crypto find Shiba to be a popular medium of donation. In all the charities I found on both Google and ShibaSearch in the top 5 pages, each and every of them had Shiba listed as a donation option! And since all cryptocurrency donations are exempted from capital gains tax by the IRS, that makes Shiba an even more extensive medium of donation.

Coincidence? I don’t think so.