The Charity Commission has published research showing that overall trust in the charity sector has dropped in the last decade. Comparing survey results from 2014 to 2020, 2018 showed the least public trust in UK charity with a score of 5.5 of 10. The 2020 results show an uptick in trust to a score of 6.2 of 10, but still not reaching the 2014 trust score of 6.7 of 10. The downturn in public support for charities may be a result of scandals that have broken in the last few years, during the time that the surveys were recorded.
One such story is that of the King of the United Kingdom â Charles III accepted a donation worth of ÂŁ1 million cash from a Qatari politician, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber al-Thani. No further investigation was taken to trace the source of income as it was alleged by the charity watchdog that thorough due diligence had been carried out by The Prince of Walesâ Charitable Fund in accepting this donation and that it is common for Middle East people to carry large amounts of cash.
The lack of transparency in the charity sector has long been under criticism, with regulators trying to find the most practical way of overseeing charities and penalising those who commit donor fraud. In part, this is challenged by the traditional system of giving.
At the same time, the pandemic caused stunted growth to many economies in the world, leading to even more people living in poverty being left behind. The charity sector has never been as important as it is now, as the UK struggles to deliver essential services in a post-Brexit, post-covid reality. Maxity â a Web3 Social Impact Protocol, is the answer to charities being able to fundraise in a transparent way.
A Web 3 Social Impact Protocol
The greatest feature of blockchain is its transparency and immutability. The white paper of blockchain was first released in 2008 by a nobody called Satoshi Nakamoto, meant to eliminate the need for intermediaries such as banks or insurance companies between buyers and sellers.
The idea is relatively simple â instead of having a middle person to verify credibility of users for loan, or to set up fixed term deposit for earning interest, these are all replaced by a distributed ledger that records all transaction data and maintained by all users of the system known as ânodesâ. Once encrypted data has been uploaded to the blockchain, it is permanently indelible and unalterable. One of the famous examples of blockchain is Bitcoin, but since its transaction process capability is limited at 7 transactions per second (TPS), there are now more and more blockchains being developed to scale up the throughput of a network.
Maxity, a platform built on the Polygon chain, is the worldâs first Web 3 Social Impact Protocol that aims to strengthen charity transparency and support fundraising issues, all towards contributing to and achieving the United Nation 17 Global Goals. It is the platform that provides a one-stop solution for registering fundraising, fund management, expenditure, financial ledgers and reports, proposals for implementing activities, and results of all projects on the blockchain for verification.
Charity DAO, a sub-DAO of Maxity, is the world's first licensed philanthropy DAO. It focuses on fundraising for emergency causes within 24 hours and aims to build a community that connects worldwide charities with decentralised Web3 technology. By assisting charities and NGOs to design, create, publish, and sell NFTs on Maxityâs NFT marketplace, Charity DAO brings a new way to help charities with emergency fundraising and help them to build trust and improve transparency.
Maxityâs NFT marketplace was launched on the 1st April 2022 for the purpose of registering fundraising via direct donations. The NFT trading platform is a multi-chain (Polygon and Ethereum) donation platform that encourages storytelling through NFTs to enable charities and NGOs to develop a deeper connection with the audience. To lower the barrier of engaging with the blockchain sector, Maxity has also introduced fiat payment for donors to donate or purchase NFTs through their bank cards.
In the near future, Maxity will launch a series of products which include a decentralised finance (DeFi) platform for fundraisers to deposit, manage or lock up their MAX Token (Maxityâs native token) to get rewards through yield-farming. Similar to traditional fixed rate savings, yield-farming or staking works with fundraisers locking up an amount of MAX Token to our DeFi platform for a specific period in an effort to earn additional coins or tokens which can later be exchanged to fiats (USD, GBP, etc).
Unlike traditional financial institutions which may be unavailable in some developing countries or have a lengthy and complicated background screening process, Maxityâs DeFi platform will function as long as fundraisers have access to the internet and also a DeFi wallet. A DeFi wallet is a digital wallet that allows users to store and manage different cryptocurrencies, and it can be imagined to be a bank account, with the funding passwords known as private keys, and the sort codes and account numbers known as addresses. With the userâs address comes the capabilities to access its past transaction on blockchain explorer, which is why Maxity encourages charities to make contributions to support groups, compliant goods and services providers using a decentralised wallet. This is to remove intermediaries and monitor the accountability and transparency of cash flows.
Maxity, a platform built on the carbon-neutral and climate positive blockchains, aims to support the four pillars of sustainability, i.e., human, social, economic, and environmental. Through Maxity, every transaction from fundraising to implementation of a project is recorded on the chain. Maxity also adopts a new established model âVolunteer and Reward (V&R), which incentivises more people to start giving to society. Not only charities and NGOs profit from the contributions of volunteers, but the donors also receive benefits such as tax credits and a digital token of appreciation for their donation.
