Stephen: This is your host, Stephen Sargeant, the Around The Coin podcast. We have a two time guest, Pat Duffy, co-founder of The Giving Block, which is actually now a Shift 4 company. We talk all about crypto donations. What's actually happening in the nonprofit space? It's a lot more complex, and for you, those are in the payment tech or crypto space, and you have some extra crypto funds.

This is not a tech, this is not tax advice. This But there's some interesting use cases to help lower some of your taxable income by donating in crypto. We talk about payments. This is such a great conversation. Pass us one of those guys that you can listen to forever. And he has such great, authentic advice when it comes to what's happening in a nonprofit space and what companies could do to add crypto donations as part of their infrastructure.

Reach out to me if you love this episode. I know I did. Pat's going to be one of our favorite, you know, we might bring them back a third time, so listen out for this podcast.

Stephen: This is your host Stephen Sargeant, the Around The Coin podcast. We have a guest that is no stranger to the podcast, Pat Duffy, who's the co-founder of The Giving Block. Pat, give us a little bit of, you know, people know you, they've seen you on the podcast, and they've seen you other places as well, because you're quite instrumental as well.

And what's happening in crypto today, but tell us a little bit about yourself on your journey to the giving blog.

Pat: Yeah, definitely. I'm not sure that many people know me, so I'll definitely give a rundown. I'm Pat Duffy. I'm co-founder of The Giving Block. We are the main platform where donors go to give crypto to charities, and then we're the main solution provider for the charities themselves. So if you go to like a nonprofit website and you try to send them any type of cryptocurrency donation or do NFT stuff that tends to float through us.

We built kind of the rails on the charity side. We've spent the last now seven years trying to get as many nonprofits as possible to fundraise crypto and build it into a revenue channel.

Stephen: Can you tell me about the last, from where you started to where you are now with crypto, how more comfortable companies in general, but obviously the nonprofits that you focus on, how was the first conversations compared to the conversations you're having seven years later?

Pat: Yeah, definitely. In the early going, I mean, this was 2017, 2018, when we started having some of these conversations crypto was kind of hitting people's radars for the first time, so half the nonprofits we were talking to hadn't even like heard of it really, were paying attention, and then there were some nonprofits who were.

Paying a little bit of attention, but not really knowing where to go. So like the educational barrier was a lot higher. They felt the need to really understand like, what is blockchain, right? How do cryptocurrencies work? Like proof of work, proof of stake. Like you'd really have to get into the weeds before they would trust it.

Very similar to other technologies. Like when you go to buy a car now, we always say like, you're not talking about like pistons. And no one like looks at their microwave and like starts unpacking the engineering. Like eventually you really figure out like, How does this work for me? How do we accept it as a donation, etc.

So early days were a lot more of that like blockchain, crypto education, big decks for the boardrooms. And our first like 28 of our first 30 clients or so were actually nonprofits who were already taking crypto, but in some kind of wonky way, just like pasting wallet addresses on a site and taking everything anonymously or taking a crypto gift to do a wallet address and then opening a separate exchange account and trying to like liquidate it weeks later and deal with the volatility.

So it was moving some of the big nonprofit Save the Children's of the world, like over to what was our first solution. And then starting them on fundraising for the first time, because some of the charities Save the Children included have been taking crypto since like 2013.

Stephen: Wow.

Pat: And they weren't really getting those donations at all. And we were like, you have millions of Twitter followers. You've like one of the biggest donor bases. Like, why don't you get crypto? Like, how do you fundraise it? And they were like, oh, we don't fundraise this at all. So that was kind of like leg two, I would say, in talking to those charities. We were like, oh, people don't actively request donation methods.

And it wasn't just a crypto thing. It was true about stocks. It was true about donor advised funds, bank transfers. You would show up to this donate page. Credit card was the only option. And the only way a donor would even know they could send stocks, crypto, real estate to a charity is if they like called somebody, right?

They send a support request. They're like, can I send you this other thing? And then the charity would have kind of this background process for it. So there was no active solicitation at all for something like crypto with this huge community. We knew that there was room there. So phase two was kind of like getting nonprofits to talk about it a little bit.

That's when Save the Children's and American Cancer Society started doing things like the Cancer Crypto Fund. They'd be like, we're raising 10 million for cancer research. Let's carve out a million dollar goal and call it the Cancer Crypto Fund and say, it'll be the first cancer research grant fully funded using cryptocurrency.

And that would get our media, the press would pay attention. They'd raise a million dollars in a couple of weeks. And then from there, it's been a lot more of just a solutioning and fundraising kind of meeting in the middle.

Stephen: Talk to me about yourself. And this is, you know, pre-conversation and before we press record, you're super young, , you're obviously tech, crypto, and entrepreneurial savvy. You won Forbes 30 under 30 a couple of years ago. You start in 2018. You know, at that point most people have now heard of Bitcoin. You know, they saw the spike in 2017.

You know, ICOs are going crazy. Other, you know. This token is the next Bitcoin was very, very prominent in the space. Why did you decide to go like the philanthropy route? You know, more on the giving and charitable side when you probably could have been a demon on the other side and completely killed it because you've been in this space and we're so knowledgeable about it.

You could've probably profited on just pure speculation at that time.

Pat: Yeah, well one, I'm not that good at trading crypto, so like I figured that out real quick. I just knew buddies who were, you know, forming groups and getting into early stage ICOs and stuff like that. Like I, I just didn't have the I didn't have some of the skill sets they had not good at technical analysis and all that stuff and the like swing trading. So ultimately, I mean, I was working at a nonprofit at the time, so there was some overlap there. And then we did, to your point, like, talk about some nonprofit use cases. My co-founder and I were both, like, really interested in starting a business. Like, it's, I had been, you know, selling Bluetooth speakers at flea markets to, like, pay for study abroad.

He was, like, helping people sell their cars on eBay. Flipping domains. So, we like the idea of starting a business. We saw this nonprofit intersection. We looked at some of the other options and we genuinely thought, A, the nonprofit intersection is something that's going to be a higher a front loaded part of the adoption curve just because Charities are trusted.

Institutional entities, like the use cases are actually cool to see, right, just using blockchain for decentralized IDs for refugees moving across borders or intergovernmental, like, remittances from one country to another. Like, we just saw these things that we knew would be effective use cases, but also, like, for good use cases as we were trying to, you know, I think everyone was trying to get more trust in cryptocurrency, something that we have been building up, and the laws with FTX have been building up again with the institutional adoption.

So it ended up being a confluence of variables. We both supported nonprofits and liked working with nonprofits. We saw that the industry was going to, as long as the use cases continued, be, I think, at the front end of an adoption curve that even the for profit companies were kind of lagging behind.

Stephen: Right.

Pat: And then the core use case that the company, when we were building it, was targeting was this tax incentive. Like there was this huge, really pivotal point where we realized like, Oh, you don't pay taxes on crypto that you donate. And when you look at stock or crypto real estate, the donors didn't really know that at that time.

Like a lot of crypto people still don't even think of their crypto as a donation method. Like they think of it as an investment. There's huddle culture. They never want to dump it. So you have to educate them on that. And the charities don't think of crypto as a donation method because like they weren't interfacing with it.

But the reality was, you could take a million dollars in Bitcoin that was appreciated, you could send it to a charity, you could take the million dollars you had in the bank, buy a million dollars in Bitcoin, same day, with no washroll, and what you have is the same crypto position you started the day with.

Charity is the same million as if you sent them a donation, but you just erased up to two, three hundred grand of capital gains tax liability. It's like this. Magic tax arbitrage move. So in..

Stephen: And you're doing good while you're doing it, right? Heh, like, it does have the benefit of, Was there anything that you had on the list? Probably had a piece of paper, you and your co-founder. Was there anything that you were interested in that you've seen come to fruition? Or maybe even died that you're like, Oh, this would've been a cool for profit play.

And you're like, ah, just at the last second, you're like, let's go the nonprofit road.

Pat: yeah, definitely. I mean, we can't like, there's certain things like I'd say that in the future, for example, we may still want to like work on an action. But I think there's a lot of, just in the, in the payments space and then like exchanges, like there's still, I think a lot of demand for like solving certain problems, selling shovels, I think in both those areas.

Stephen: How about when you started out, you know, you're doing something philanthropic. Was there traditional, you know, you know, people like the Bill Gates of the world that were like, Hey, we love what you're doing. We never even thought about crypto. Did you get a lot of inbound back at that time of people that are like already doing good?

Then they're like, Hey, we didn't even think about this method. We want to learn more about what you're doing because I feel like People that are about giving, they usually like find others are about giving and they kind of, you know, join together as a small community.

Pat: God, do I wish that's what happened. If Bill Gates had been, Diabogas being like, wait, let's, let's collab. That would have been, that would have made the entire process a lot easier. Not, not a ton, honestly, in terms of like inbound and people. It was a lot of you know, it's funny. I mean, we used to post all the time.

We'd have this GF. Have you seen Napoleon Dynamite?

Stephen: Yeah.

Pat: You know what I'm talking about? Like in that movie, he's trying to feed lasagna to like a llama. At one point in it, he's like trying to feed it out of the train. He's like trying to get its head out of the way. And it's like, he's like flinging lasagna toward it.

And we used to have this meme where it's like cryptocurrencies like flying off the spoon. It's nonprofits like trying to get their heads out of the way. Like people are trying to give them money and they're like doing everything they can to resist it. a lot more of that, like even the people who had crypto were like donating cash, were like doing this education.

It took a lot of education where they'd be like, Oh, I could give significantly more and lower my tax bill simultaneously if I give non cash assets. So we're doing that education curve, and that was kind of an uphill battle. And then the RAs, the advisors, the people working with folks, like if they weren't into crypto, and they have people that they're working with who they're not actively managing it, that we had to find that intersection where the donor's trying to give a particular way.

And then the nonprofits have so much red tape. They operate on an annual calendar. Every single year, they have to start over fundraising, and it's really hard to change anything because of the nonprofit, because of this kind of overhead myth and all these things that the donors kind of put pressure on the charity to like not spend money on innovation and really make sure that it's hyper efficient.

It's really tough to get a nonprofit or someone at a nonprofit to advocate for a new technology. That could take time and energy, even if there's like exponential potential upside, right? They really gravitate toward the conservative approaches because there's no risk of losing your job. There's no risk of bothering the donors.

Staying at that baseline is a lot safer than trying to take a leap and try something new. So across the board, it was honestly like, like pulling teeth. We had to invent fundraising days. We had to educate donors. We had to educate charities and kind of then build a platform where the donors and the charities came together.

We knew the use case was strong and the value was there, but it took a lot of building for sure.

Stephen: Demystified that in the, you know, you talked about, you know, high overhead, low overhead, you know, pressure from donors, you know, we saw a lot with the ALS, I think it's ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, right? It was all going fine, they're raising a ton of funds, celebrities were in it, and then you had this, like, subgroup of people, like, posting how much some of those People that were running that association were making and you know, we should be donating to them.

Look how much money they're making. Talk to me, give me maybe devil's advocate about both sides. Cause you've probably seen both sides and you know, for people that see that and they're like, Hey, if they're spending this much on innovation and technology, shouldn't they be spending a hundred % of the money to feed the kids?

Like what are you guys doing? Paying a marketing person or. Walk us through that because I think that's the toughest part for a lot of people to understand. And I think everyone's been on both sides where they've been trying to collect donations and they've also donated to organizations.

Pat: Yeah, it's a huge like question and a huge problem in terms of like trying to find answers because every nonprofit is different. Generally speaking, nonprofits with no overhead aren't that valuable in my opinion. And it's, it's what donors really push for. It's this kind of vicious cycle of the donor being like, to your point, if you're trying to like feed kids and the kids are hungry.

You have this very natural, I think, inclination to say, like, I want 100% of the dollars I give you to end up going toward that sandwich that ends up in a kid's hands, right? And that's a very natural feeling, but generally speaking, the nonprofits who have the greatest impact are ones who not only do that, but market them to a larger audience to take in more money, right?

If you, if you're doing just that and you're bringing in a hundred grand worth of food for those families, or you can pay a really smart person who was a senior executive at a for profit company to come in. Build up a marketing channel and then they get paid a lot. They make a big institution out of it.

And now they're generating 10, 100 times as much value to that community. You not only have more value go to the community, but you have people who would otherwise be making their money at oil companies, pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. And now they're..

Stephen: We see a lot of that. I think it's Well Water or Smart Water or one of those you know, companies. They bring in legitimate executives.

Pat: yeah, exactly. And they, it's this It's kind of like a puritanical, almost like disgust reflex when you see people making money helping people, like you think you shouldn't. You're like, you should go make money doing something bad and then give some of it away, which is like, if everyone who got rich in the world was getting rich, like building an irrigation system that worked for like, you know, Sub Saharan Africa, like that would be a better way, you know, but people have a really tough time knowing that any of the money isn't going to that particular use case.

And I think ultimately like the best thing you can do. So long as there's not wasteful overhead is pay people to sit at desks, try to figure out like, how do we ensure that less of these kids become hungry in the first place? And giving people food will never solve for that. So there are plenty of nonprofits out there that spend a lot of money on like, gatherings at a nice hotel and you see them with like Mai Tais.

They're just, they're, they waste money, right? These institutions get bloated and they can become wasteful. But there's also nonprofits with zero overhead that will just never scale. And because of that zero overhead relationship with the donor, they'll never throw money at something that has like a 10X upside, but a potential.

10-20 % downside risk. So you're, you're hurting the scalability of solutions that you actually believe in by not giving them some financial flexibility. In the same way, you would never say to Apple, 100 % of the money I give you for this laptop shouldn't go into making the next one better.

Like we just wouldn't want that in the, in the world. So I don't know why I guess folks would want it out of charities.

Stephen: It's always hard when you're talking about people's hard earned money, right? They want to And they're like, Hey, we're giving it to you. So we should tell you exact. So it's like accepting money from your parents, right?

Pat: Yeah, no, that's exactly right.

Stephen: You ask for money, like, you know, always watching shows we're like, "Hey, you know, my, my in laws are offering me a hundred thousand dollars for us to get our first house."

And the guy will always be like, do not take that money. They have good intentions, but trust me, then they start questioning what vacations are going on. And what shoes your children are wearing. It's the exact same situation, right? Where the intent to give is good. But we just turn into this animal once we see where the money's going, if it's not being spent exactly the way we perceive it should be.

And I think you did a good job of like level saying like, hey, on the, on the worst side, there's bloat and everyone's making money and we're not really focusing on the problem. But on the innovative side, we're using that money to generate not only more money for the charity and the person that we're trying to help or people or situation, but research and development to figure out, Hey, we're not solving the problem, what's the underlying problem that we can solve with this money in the meantime, and I think you've kind of stretched our eyes across the spectrum.

But tell me about early on. So how does, you know, I think for a lot of people that are like, Hey, are, are you holding the crypto for these nonprofits? Is there a nonprofit that started with you six years ago? That's on the, you know, a stockpile of Bitcoin right now, because they didn't have to spend all their funds on, you know, the not for profit side.

Walk us through that cycle is like, Hey, I'm a donor with $100, 000 worth of Bitcoin, and I want to donate to ABC charity. How does that work?

Pat: The vast, vast, vast majority of like the nonprofits we work with have like a, an auto sell program that we have like tied into the product. So as soon as cryptocurrency hits the account, it's, it's immediately liquidated for cash. There's no price volatility that the nonprofit rides out and then those U.S. Dollars go toward the mission, right? The charity can take the gift, the donor gets the direct transfer, tax incentive where it's not. If the donor liquidated in advance, it's ultimately a taxable event. That's the reason it needs to be the transfer. But the U.S. Dollars are then what go toward the mission.

Like, that's most nonprofits. But to your point. There are some nonprofits who choose to not have that program running, who like hold the crypto. And what I always say for nonprofits, it's like hindsight 2020, like when to hold it, when to not hold it. There are a lot of nonprofits who want to do that, that I always say, like, if you don't have an endowment, if you're not currently investing in any way, similar to how I talk to friends, they're like, should I get some crypto?

I'm like, do you have stocks? Have you invested before? Because like, if this is your first time, you're probably going to wait until it's in the news and then remember to buy it all of a sudden, buy it at the top of a bubble and then panic sell, like you're just going to do that every time. So nonprofits can be the same way.

So there are nonprofits, yes, from the early days who've been accepting crypto and holding it during this period. Some of those nonprofits, of course, sold during certain periods, right? Like the 2021 2022 surge exited some of those positions. Some have continued to hold throughout that period. But there are also nonprofits who like at the top of 2021, 2022 are like, turn off the auto sale because it's going to go up forever.

And we're like, I can't give you financial advice, but like, be careful, you know, so you definitely can.

Stephen: money at some point.

Pat: Yeah, numbers sometimes go down, you know,

Stephen: Like it always does in crypto. Talk to me about like, you not only have this mechanism, almost like buyers, you have a marketplace where donors and charities can kind of meet up. But you also have like a product solution. Tell me a little bit about the solution, the whole ecosystem. You got plugins, you got integrations.

Like, this is a full blown operation that you're running. And when did you start that? Was that the first evolution of the giving block? Or is this something over time? You're like, Hey, we need to add in these things because these are the products and services and, you know, integrations that our nonprofits are using, we have to find a way to work with them in the, to make this process almost seamless for them.

Pat: It's definitely been, yeah, in the learning curve. Right? It was not right for we just have the whole plane mapped out that it worked out perfect, It's, we started with just a solution automatically sold the crypto and made it easy to collect donor details. Cause like those are the two main problems. So we just were able to copy and paste a product that would automatically sell the crypto, take in donor information if they wanted to enter it with an anonymous option on off If the charities wanted to accept anonymous gifts or not and then initiating a compliant tax receipt.

Like that was the starting point. But then after that, to your point, these nonprofits use all these different CRMs and databases. They want to be able to have that data flow seamlessly into that CRM. If they don't, then they don't really follow up with the donors or stewardess effectively. It just adds kind of friction.

So then that was a big piece, knowing that like when these crypto donors come in, they The odds of them being retained is like highly connected to whether or not the nonprofit is getting notifications in their CRM and it's flowing into their kind of reports and their dashboard. So those integrations were really important.

Then on the donor side, we had all these nonprofits who were fundraising independently, but they're all just decentralized, right? Like, they're all operating their own independent fundraising arms. When donors go online, where can I give crypto to charities? There wasn't really a home for that. So we started aggregating all the nonprofits that we were setting up into this one place that was like searchable, and then setting up copies of those same donation forms in there.

And then like really for seven years now, like leaning into the search engine optimization of that, and like really making sure that when people go online to find these causes to give to, that they can find them. And then the iteration after that was helping the charities themselves that we work with, like search engine optimize their pages and work on their experience outside of the giving form.

Because there were all these nonprofits who they'd have this donate crypto page, but it's not in their like ways to give menu or connected to their donate page. Then we started not only working on the website side of it, but building integrations into the payment software that they use for like their core kind of credit card donation processing.

And those were kind of like the iterations before, I guess now the final thing is we got it stock and. Donor Advice Fund giving. Just so nonprofits, when they're taking these gifts, the donor could be like, I have stocks, I have crypto, which has gone up the most. I'll give one or the other. They integrate nicely and if they've already moved that money into what's called a Donor Advice Fund, where you get that tax exemption, and then you can initiate a grant out of that account later, they can do all of those things regardless of the investment types they're looking to give.

Stephen: That's super interesting. Can you tell me about like, maybe a fun story? Was there like a whale that came in one day and just started, you know, pelting all these different charities with, you know, crypto? Was there a situation where like an NFT project didn't go the way that a crypto project, like you have any, you know, the funny stories that you have during your Slack channels, like, Hey, did you guys just see what happened here?

Or like, wow, I didn't expect that to happen. Or, Hey, this, this person is blowing up on crypto Twitter. And all of a sudden they have millions of dollars worth of donations.

Pat: Yeah, there's some really good ones. I mean, we, I'll rip through a few of them. One was a like, anonymous account on Twitter. It was like, kind of had a good following. It was very much a part of the meme, Have Fun Staying Poor. Like, that Twitter meme, and then donated millions of dollars to a poverty charity.

And the charity was like, I don't know how to reconcile these two things. Like base this person's public persona. But then they wrote this really nice note about like, they grew up in like, just came from a tough background and like the work they were doing was really meaningful. And we had to have this whole conversation with the charity.

We were like this, were kind of mad about it. I was like, based on this note, this is a good person with a different sense of humor than you're used to enjoy. Like, I think this is fine. Like, this doesn't seem like a monster. It seems like a nice person who's like venting some personal experience through some memes.

That one was a good one just because it was millions of dollars going to a charity that was like the inverse of their entire public persona, but the public persona was ironic, of course. That one I loved. We had one person come several times giving like 100, 000 slugs to just seemingly random charities, like 13, 15 at a time.

And they kept coming through. We were like, as long as this sustains for forever, like we'll just have infinite success.

Stephen: Clamoring like, give us that person's email address.

Pat: yeah,

Stephen: I love to get them in our marketing campaign.

Pat: Yeah. They were being uh, yeah, they were completely anonymous. So still don't know who that was. And one of the charities that they gave to had onboarded the, like the morning of, so they onboarded it and then like a hundred grand hit their account. And they were like, really upset with us, like had to have a meeting because they thought it was a scam.

And They were like, I don't know what you're trying to play here, but like, we just

Stephen: They thought you were like, padding their account to make it look like they made the right choice and

Pat: yeah. And they were like, what are you doing? And I was like, I swear to God, like, I don't, like, you just got incredibly lucky. And then people in our team started talking about that publicly.

And I was like, don't talk about it too much. Cause every charity who signs up is going to be like, oh, I just

Stephen: Yeah.

Pat: signed up for the giving block and I'll get infinite money. Those were fun ones. And then I would say during COVID the Barstool fundraiser for Dave Portnoy was like getting into crypto a little bit then.

And my co-founder just like commented on one of his threads saying like we could help them take crypto for that fundraiser. And then Dave Portnoy and Erica Nardini like ended up like contacting us and we set them up for that fundraiser and they raised a ton of money for small businesses through COVID.

And that just came from him just kind of shitposting on Twitter. And then we just kind of slid in there. So lots of cool stories like that, for sure.

Stephen: That's amazing. Do you guys have like a, you know, am I going to see you in some of the one bite videos on Instagram where you're like both trying, you and your co-founder are trying pizza with Dave? No, not anytime?..

Pat: I wish. would love to get back in. Yeah, we don't have like a close relationship with them or anything. It was just, it was cool that they set it up.

Stephen: That's super cool. Give us, like, the existing, like, traditional donation landscape.

What are some of the biggest challenges? I'm assuming that, like, hey, during a recessionary time, where we kind of feel like we're in, like, people ain't got a lot of money to donate, but we do see some, you know, you know, kind gestures, as you just mentioned. What's the current traditional landscape, and how is the Giving Block solving, or at least, Amplifying that to give, you know, operations that are operating non for profit or charities more options in accepting funds.

Pat: One of the biggest issues that nonprofits have right now is they're betting on, and reasonably so, older and older donors. So like the average donor age has continued to go up just because that's where the wealth is and that's where the most giving comes from, generally speaking, and that's worked for them up until recently, because like the, the Transformation from one gender to another or generation to another in terms of how they give wasn't that crazy.

Like nonprofits could really at each wealth transfer stage kind of just make the adjustment and keep rolling. But this one's definitely getting dicey. So I'd say like the overall landscape, just right now, the average donor age is like in their 60s, sometimes in their 70s for the clients that we serve, which is like really Just highly out of sync with the overall population level and who's hitting their peak earning years and recipients of the Great Wealth Transfer.

So generally speaking, you have these major gifts arms, which is like big donations, planned giving arms, which is like people putting stuff in their will. And then the overall fundraising targeting things like direct mail, where they send letters to people and get checks back. Like so much of the revenue is concentrated in those areas and working with like kind of these traditional donors.

And then what happens is they have investments that they make in younger donors, but they can't bet on long tail stuff because of, like we said, it's this annual calendar. So they can't spend money and not get it back the same year because they, donors will panic and it's just, Too much risk for the individuals at an organization like to lose their job.

So what happens is they do these kind of small investment, small return things with younger donors. They're like 10 bucks a month and walk teams and these programs where they're not treating younger donors like they could be these major donors because that bridge hasn't been there. It takes a lot of stewardship and you form a junior board and you get these younger people kind of worked up into being big donors.

Crypto and stocks, crypto in particular, but I think both of them, are these really cool bridges, I think, for nonprofits that they should be using to bridge that gap between younger donors, that they need to bolster that donor base, that they don't need to Like lemmings over a cliff as the great wealth transfer happens.

But the average gift size is like 5 to 15 grand for a crypto stock because it's tax optimized. It's a non cash asset. So it's one of these rare opportunities where you can engage donors who are on average late 20s to early 40s, but they're giving average gift sizes like these donors in their 60s, 70s.

Stephen: They got money. They got money. They're not living in, you know, a one bedroom with seven people eating ramen noodles. They just made a quick buck. Maybe not even quick, but they, they have money. They have access to money that our gener or at least my generation didn't have access to at our age.

Pat: yeah, they've got money and it's a natural reason to ask for more. Because what will happen is like. In a particular year, they make the year that they make a lot of money, let's say trading crypto, or they've got like, it makes more sense to make a bigger gift that year as an offset. And when the crypto is up a lot, the more they give, the more they're raising the tax, like implications up.

So you have this like natural thing to lean into versus younger dudes, you've been asked for 10 bucks a month. You're like, how about 20 grand? They're like, what are you talking about? Why? You know what I mean? Versus like. You're crypto's up this much, and there's this tax incentive and this other stuff.

It's this very natural where the younger donor's like, Oh, the 20 grand I was going to give over the next 10 years, I can give it this year and it's better for my bottom line. And the charity gets it now. And you take these really big leaps by getting these younger donors to look at their stock and their crypto every November, December.

And decide, am I making one of these big gifts this year? It just moves them right into major gifts and starts, I think, that bolstering of the donor base without you needing to invent some reason why they should suddenly be 10 to 20 times as generous. Like, I really think it's like a beautiful kind of natural bridge into building a donor base that's a lot more future proof.

Stephen: And a lot of these people, especially in NFT, you know, if you make a couple bucks on one NFT and you, you know, lost on NFT, They would try and sell those, you know, those losses to try and, you know, make their taxable bill and said they can keep their NFTs and make a donation and get the same impact. Are you seeing even just Gen Z in general?

I feel like there's this younger generation, maybe just the same way back when, you know, World War II was happening. Is so much for doing better in society, doing more. We're in a generation where, you know, whether it's Russia and Ukraine, whether it's the Middle East, is like, do you see that there's a more of a drive to, you know, pursue more noble things?

Or do you think this is still more of a tax incentive strategy that the nonprofits should be using? Right. Hmm.

Pat: like old the old heads, the nonprofit community they'll say things like this younger generation, like they have no, like, like loyalty, like brand loyalty and stuff like that. Like it's a loyalty issue. But generally speaking, what I think is you just, similar to access to information and things, like you just have a lot more choices.

So you end up just making better choices because there's more options. So I think back in the day, you would have this natural alignment with your, with your church or with some local charity or someone that your family had given to, and you're not bombarded with these alternate options that could be perceived as higher impact.

So the fact of the matter is, like, you have to be high impact, like, nonprofits need to be able to say, like, the dollar that you give me. Produces better research outcomes than if you were to give it somewhere else. Or like the thing that's happening that we're fundraising for is time sensitive, right?

Ukraine or whatever else is going like this. The money is needed right now because They just have more inventory. Like, there's, there's things that they're considering that they could be giving to, and they have a lot more exposure to causes and things they could be potentially aligned with. So, like, the case needs to be stronger.

And I think with younger donors, I don't think they're, there's like, like, older people, no, they were more, like, morally righteous and invested in these causes than the younger generation. Like, no, we're the ones who actually care more. There's like, I don't think any of that is inherently true, I think.

We're still just operating off of the same limbic system. Like I think people are a balance of good and bad and societally reinforced, but ultimately I think it just comes down to like the choices are greater. So their ability to decide what is actually time sensitive or what is actually high impact requires a stronger case to be made.

So the nonprofits who get complacent and try to run that same, you know, game plan over and over and over again, they start losing ground because other cases are being made stronger and you're trying to, you know, stick to the same place.

Stephen: I'm at that age too where I'm like, you know, this is not rap music. You don't know rap music. Rap music's way back when. And then it's like, oh yeah, that's what my parents said to me. And it's like, oh, it's not like, it's not the music. It's who you are in the, you know, the age you are in that feeling at the time you're hearing the music.

That's actually what's changing, not the actual Call the quality of the music,

Pat: 100%. I remember when hip hop became lame, like to say hip hop, do you know what I mean? Like saying hip hop instead of rap music. I say hip hop and people are like, what are you talking about?

Stephen: Talk to me about, we talked a little bit about Ukraine in the Middle East. Where are you compared to like a GoFundMe? Because with GoFundMe you weren't able to donate to Ukraine because they were kind of using that money to defend themselves using military grade equipment. I'm from Canada, so I remember, like, hey, if you donated to the Freedom Convoy, like, A, the GoFundMe didn't allow your donations to go through, and B, all of a sudden now the government wanted your information, including your Not only bank accounts, your crypto information, if you're making donations that way, do you still suffer from some of the challenges that GoFundMe has made from a centralized perspective?

Or am I able to donate to like, you know, buy armor for, you know, a Ukraine, a small Ukraine outfit fighting off the Russians?

Pat: Yeah, it's a really good question. So like, our limitations are based on Gemini, like the exchange that we partner with. Cause like, for important reasons. So that it's, again, it can liquidate immediately. It's a cash, it's not a wallet, an overdue an exchange. So that the cash is FDIC insured. So that.

Blacklisted wallet addresses from like sanctioned countries that could get a whole nonprofit's financial infrastructure shut down, like setting up a nonprofit with just a wallet that's not connected to a highly regulated exchange account is so unbelievably dangerous for the charity. Like there's so many people who love, like me, crypto and like wallet addresses and they're fully decentralized.

They're not tied to a blockchain. A centralized institution, like that was kind of the point of a lot of this tech. When it comes to like institutional level risk though, where if something comes in from the wrong place and then like the FBI comes in and needs to investigate, like it was tied to a hack or something, which happens to charities, like a decent amount.

It's just not worth that level of risk. So like, that's the one one of the two limitations, like whatever Gemini. allows in terms of money coming in and money going out. So it's, it's based on their regulations. We don't make our own rules on top of that. And then the nonprofit side of it, like what is the nonprofit comfortable fundraising for or not?

And because each of the nonprofits has their own gift acceptance policy, And their own rules in terms of like, what types of causes they'll support or not support. We end up having kind of a balanced effort. So like in Ukraine, it's a lot more one sided. And then for things like the Israeli Palestinian conflict, like we have a bunch of like civilian related funds that are going in one direction or the other or hybrid.

Stephen: right.

Pat: But no, we don't, we don't set up any additional limitations, like The legal team and the compliance and the, you know, the chain analysis and everything that a big exchange like a Gemini uses, reporting to all the regulators, compliance, 2, all of that stuff kind of covers the basis for us, in addition to the nonprofit policies, we just kind of let everyone operate based on what they feel is right.

Stephen: And that's amazing. And, you know, charities have always had this, you know, there's always that kind of terrorist financing angle, they're collecting donations on behalf of a charity and it's not really a charity. So yeah, I'm sure nonprofits have to be extra cautious, especially when dealing with crypto.

We talked a little bit about, you know, the marketing side of it. From your experience, like what can some of these nonprofits do to get more exposure out there if they don't have a ton of, you know, already donations to use for a marketing person or a former executive at a large tech company, what are some of the things that you've seen, you know, maybe guerrilla marketing or other things that you've seen that nonprofits have been doing really well?

I think you even had a blog about some of the things that they can do to become more attractive. But what are some of the things that you think?

Pat: Yeah, so you've got day trading attention behind you, which is like a good starting point for all of this. Like being interesting is a really important piece. There are a lot of nonprofits who are doing great work and they're intensely frustrated that nobody cares about it.

Stephen: Right.

Pat: And it's just, you're not, like, they're not being interesting.

They're not, like, learning about, like, what trends are happening at a certain point in time and trying to select posts related to it. They're not, like, commenting on other people's posts. When it comes to social media, It's something we saw with like Wendy's and these corporate accounts that like started like talking trash and being more interesting being funny.

Those sorts of things can be really valuable. And then like just changing up the messaging. Like there's a lot of causes where they don't do things that are interesting. And then they also try not to try the right way to word this. There's a culture in the nonprofit sector where you don't want to use the victims as like bait for donation.

Stephen: Almost like, you don't want to exploit the vulnerable, they're already going through enough. You don't want to exploit, you know, the, the person, you know, getting food when flies are around them. I guess we saw a lot of that, you know, back in the day too.

Pat: Yeah. So the, and, and to your point, like reasonably so, cause some of it felt like very like exploitative. But now there's a lot of nonprofits where it's like, like I worked at the Lupus Foundation. Like they wouldn't even talk about the fact that it was deadly. Like, cause it was too, like, they would avoid these like things that they consider the kind of dark or it's too aggressive.

Like they want to be like positive and we're moving forward with doing these things. And I think that holds a lot of nonprofits back for sure. Just because. If they don't know like the gravity of the problem, I think that can hurt. And then finally on the crypto piece, like the kind of obvious one, they don't tell anyone about it.

Like the, the top performing press release of every nonprofit we ever worked with, we worked with. Thousands now at this point on the platform other than one charity that had a research breakthrough, the top performing press release that year was saying they take crypto. Beats literally every other thing that they have to say.

And it's like, and this is again, back to being interesting. It's like, it just is interesting still that a charity, especially a notable charity is like taking crypto donations and anything they can tie back to that. Like they'll have, you know, McDonald's is sponsoring some big match campaign. They're Would you match crypto donations?

And all I mean by that is if someone gives us a hundred grand in Bitcoin, will you just give us a hundred grand cash? And they're like, yeah, so you're matching crypto donations. And then they're like, McDonald's is matching crypto. And like all of this, just, just say the crypto stuff. We take Bitcoin. We also, and then say, we take Ethereum.

And now it's the different cryptos. Like you just find these ways to be interesting and relevant and tell those stories.

Stephen: I'm curious, we talked about, you know, Gary V's book. You know, one thing he talks about is exactly that, the attention. But one thing he says about charities and not for profits is They have so much audacity, right? They care so much about the challenges that they're solving. They just assume everyone should as well.

And they kind of approach people in that way. Like what you don't care about the kids dying in ABC country. And you're like, yeah, but like, there's a lot of countries that there's a lot of different, as you say, options. It's like, they almost make people feel bad for not caring. Do you still think that there's a lot of audacity or.

Have, you know, these not for profits realize like, Hey, there are a lot of options. We really have to tell the story a lot, but more, they kind of like, Hey guys, this is important, obviously. Why isn't everyone donating? And almost like looking at you like a bad person for not.

Pat: No, I completely agree. It's like that South Park, I don't know if you've seen that Whole Foods one, where he keeps trying to check out, they keep trying to get him to give a dollar, that they like announce over the sound system that he's not giving a dollar and stuff like that, like, I don't think that the tactics and the pressure necessarily that they're doing that, but in terms of internal belief systems, it's the same with political parties as it is with Charities, like there's this, complete lack of appreciation for the fact that they're considering all these other causes that are also important.

Like they're so bought into how important their cause is because it is. Whatever they're working on is usually incredibly important and their work is high impact. But they say it so much internally that like they're used to it and they don't realize that like every person they're talking to is starting from zero.

Like they might not care about this cause at all, not because it's not significant, but because there's an educational gap or they might care about some other cause more than your cause. And that's okay because they have some personal connection to it, even though it impacts less people. Like there's not nearly enough of that in terms of the construction of the messaging.

Like they end up speaking to, I think like political parties speak to their base, like talking to their base a lot. Like they just assume, you know, what the disease is and you know, who's impacted by it

Stephen: Yeah, everyone's right about it. You're like, no, I didn't know Lupus was deadly first of all. So like. Maybe this is something you might want to clip for that, Jerry, and just be like, I didn't know that.

Pat: Yeah, no, exactly.

Stephen: Interesting. You talked about, you know, you know, presidential elections. Are you, two part question.

Are you actively like, hey, you know, President Trump, you talked a lot about Bitcoin. Doesn't seem like you're fully educated on it, but we can help you connect donations. Are you marketing to some of these non for profits? And then second, can you work within some of these campaigns? Or there are legal structures that doesn't allow you.

They may not be exact not for profits or there might be other considerations that you have to be careful of that you can't get involved from a political lens.

Pat: Yeah. Our work is mostly with 501c3s. I like your comment about Trump's education level. A lot he's been like very supportive, but we

Stephen: crazy statements like, okay, someone he gave him like a cue card a day before and like, this is what proof of stake is. And he's like, yo, I love steak and sizzle. Why do we need the proof? Like, that was kind of like, what? Like, it was great, great headlines, but you're also like, huh?

Pat: We keep passing around the video internally where he's like, have fun with your Bitcoins and whatever else you're playing with, and then he walked off stage at the end, he was like, what do you mean playing with? Oh, so, but like, but yeah, so that's the way he talks about it, but he's very supportive of the technology.

And we're seeing like a lot more progressives also, like Richie Torres and folks like coming out and speaking to like the power of the technology to bank the unbanked and empower folks. So we're seeing a lot more political adoption. We focus on 501c3s, which is like a different category of nonprofits.

But for sure, like we're seeing a lot more political campaigns accepting cryptocurrency. And I think the, when Trump started getting more pro crypto, we thought there would be like a reflexive anti crypto message that would continue to kind of grow on the progressive side because we see that a lot.

It's like you've seen recently, it's just like, which party hates the FBI? It's like, well, if you go back five years, like it just keeps flipping. It's whoever's pro it,

Stephen: whichever one that looks better in the news at the time. It's like, I'm curious. Could you carved..

Pat: So we don't want be biased..

Stephen: ...out your technology then? Cause you have this marketplace and these campaigns could be like, Hey, I understand you're only dealing with a certain type of nonprofit, but like the technology is something that we need if we want to run this in house, or is that something that you consider of having like this tech stack versus, you know, a platform for certain types of nonprofits?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, candidates can use the exact same technology. It just wouldn't be like, you know, a profile on the giving block and donation form, like the, the company, the giving block doesn't focus on that in particular. But yeah, the donation form and everything, I'm sure it can be leveraged.

You mentioned like, you know, crypto has this stigma of like hodling, like they're not trying to part ways with their crypto, that's the whole point of They're in it for like, do you see that? Like I have, like, is that still a stigma that crypto people don't like to give away their crypto, you know, spend it much less donate it or is that there's like a complete myth in the industry?

Pat: No, it's still definitely a barrier. I mean, like billions of dollars in crypto have been donated to charity, but it should be way more. And it's not because they don't want to donate it, it's because they don't know it's a donation method. Like, this is literally just, these are, generally speaking, younger people, they do their tax on TurboTax, they buy their crypto on Coinbase, they buy stocks like Robinhood, and their nonprofit sends them a credit card form.

Like, they've never even considered that the crypto they're holding can be a donation method. And if you just say, we take crypto No one would ever send their, it would be like, if you go to the grocery store, they're like, we take stocks. It's like, I don't want to, what is the value of that to me? I lose the thing that makes me money and I give you the hyperinflationary stuff that sits in a bank.

Why would I ever switch to that thing? So like, it's up to nonprofits and financial advisors and then the individuals themselves. So like, get educated on the fact that like, there's this crazy tax arbitrage opportunity where you can donate the crypto, buy crypto with the cash you would have otherwise donated, and then your new cryptocurrency position is at today's cost basis.

So you had a million dollars worth of Bitcoin that's actually worth 800 grand after taxes because you bought it way back in the day. Give that to the charity, take the million dollars you would have donated, buy that. Now you have a million dollars worth a million dollars because it's at today's cost basis.

It's just like, it's an amazing donation method if you understand the move, but it's, we all kind of have a responsibility, especially on the nonprofit side, to educate the donor. If you just go, hey, we take Bitcoin, do you want to send that instead? They're going to say, go to hell. Why would I want to lose Bitcoin when I could be losing dollars?

Like it just, The education is really essential, I guess.

Stephen: Is there any nonprofits where like they will not accept crypto? We did the episode here on Islamic finance and they were very big on like, you know, no interest. You know, technology, they're very physical, you know, real estate assets. And they were just starting to get into the kind of technology and blockchain of real world asset tokenization.

Do you see some industries or some nonprofits are like, we can't, whether it's faith related or another reason.

Pat: No, not like entire categories, like we, we support a ton of faith based organizations, like hundreds, and then same thing with universities, like hundreds of schools and universities that take this, and then charities, and healthcare systems, community foundations, and family foundations. There's different nonprofits in all these categories that take it.

The only ones we, like, know that don't take it, generally there are misconceptions around either the technology itself or the acceptance process. Like, we'll find nonprofits who weren't taking it for years and, like, really against it. And then we find out it's, like, because of the price volatility in the market.

They're like, we don't want to take anything where we don't know how much money we're actually getting. And it's like, oh, that's been solved for, for, like, a decade. they're like, oh, fantastic. Do you know what I mean? They're like, well, we don't want to be like trading this crazy stuff into that. Or they're like, well, we don't want to take anything that's only anonymous.

We're like, oh no, it's not. I mean, you could just have a donation form that they don't even get a wallet address presented until they complete a donation form with their details. They're like, oh, well then we'd love to. You know, it's usually kind of down to that, but they're still, the majority of charities are in that boat.

They're like, I'll take it when it's regulated and then you're like, oh, it's highly regulated, like extraordinarily regulated. They're like, really?

Stephen: To see how many, you know, employees are on Gemini's compliance organizational chart and they'll probably understand how regulated it is.

Pat: Oh yeah. So it's, it's stuff like that. It's, it's largely those things. And then like, they get confused around like FTX where they're like, well, these, you know, people, you know, lose money in that situation by like trading the wrong way. Or like having these positions where you're earning like incredibly high yield in these different types of accounts.

It's like, you talk to the nonprofit, you're like, yeah, just don't do that. You know what I mean? Just they, everyone else trades crypto, they send it to you, and then it's just cash. I mean, I just use the, like, let everyone else play the game. You know, you don't need to participate in it any fuller than you want to.

Other nonprofits, of course, hold it. Sometimes they liquidate into U.S. Dollar coin and then use it to send transactions to people. Like, they use it and then track the blockchain to show transparency. Like, there's all these cool things you can do with it, but you don't have to do anything other than Accepts really tax efficient donations from people who really believe in it.

Stephen: Do you see many nonprofits paying their employees with crypto? I know like working for a crypto exchange or a very crypto native company. That's like second nature to take some of your paycheck. I think in crypto, do you see like the more they're learning about the technology, the more use cases like, Hey, we have people in Argentina, all around the world, and we're like, why are we trying to liquidate this in US dollar where if they're in Nigeria, they can't even pull out the bank account if they wanted to have you seen them like integrate it more into their operations or are we still far away from that?

Pat: Generally speaking, no, not in terms of like payroll. Just cause that's, that's a kind of a complicated use case. If they're paying the payroll in stable coins, I think people would rather have it in US dollars just cause not enough people are like parking at that on Coinbase and like earning interest on it or something.

Like they are just going to move out of that. So like when people say getting paid encrypted, they usually mean Bitcoin, Ethereum, et cetera, like something that's a speculative asset that they think will appreciate over time. And the nonprofits, I think in terms of like the accounting of it, cause like you, you have a certain amount of money that comes in and then you move it into Bitcoin and then by the time you distribute it through the payroll, like there are some differences.

I think, again, in terms of fear of inefficiency or like money being lost, nonprofits are very sensitive to that, but in terms of like stable coin use cases and like distributing. International remittances or transferring money to a place where they otherwise may struggle to. We're definitely seeing more nonprofits do that, for sure.

Stephen: Tell me about the leadership. I've always heard nonprofits have such a challenging time. With personnel, that's their biggest challenge is different visionaries, you know, people coming in and out. Do you see that, like, you know, that personnel struggle, whether it's personalities or mission or like, or is this, you know, I feel that it's so many myths in nonprofit land and you get to see so many that you're able to educate us on this from a higher level.

Pat: No, yeah, I mean, it's like companies and then sometimes worse because of the, again, like the lack of risk taking that's allowed to them by the donor base. So, for sure, there's the fundraisers who have a goal of fundraising and the issue there usually internally is like tracking who gets credit for certain things.

So you have all these arbitrary rules where like different donation methods are owned by different teams because it's really hard to otherwise like track across like who gets what gift and then there will be like you have a gala so one team goes out and gets sponsorships in advance of it. So like they get credit for that and then at the actual event itself the fundraising that happens goes to that one team.

So If the crypto donations they get from the walks program, now they're adding crypto to the gala, like, well, who's going to get credit for these gifts? They're like, they're not adding donation methods because people's like paychecks and their job security is based on the ability to track impact. So they'll defer to like simple processes with lower fundraising upside, but more trackability traceability because either internal for like your own performance evaluation, and then externally to be able to report on like impact and sources of funds.

Like that level of complexity gets real dicey. And then it also gets complicated by like the reporting requirements. So like nonprofits, there's like this transparency to it. That's like enough transparency to where they have to be like really careful about like how they spend their money, but like it doesn't tell the full story.

So they end up gravitating toward certain strategies, like things that are considered a marketing expense or a fundraising expense, go to a particular line item. So like particular teams, even if they wanted a solution, Because it goes into a budget that's like, doesn't look right or that donors are kind of like turned off by, like they can't spend money in certain areas.

So a lot of that transparency stuff, similar to our earlier conversation, ends up being really limiting because. They don't want to take virtually any risk to tracking their own performance, to reporting to the donors, like with their marketing and everything. And then also like their legal requirements on their 990s that they report annually.

Stephen: He talked a lot about donor base. Do you feel like a lot of donors are like actually that involved and, you know, intimate with what's going on? Like, I feel like when I donate to the six kids hospital, like whatever they do with it, they're, you know, giving away cars. Like that doesn't bother me. I'm not like, Hey, we need to switch the direction of what we're doing.

In nonprofit world, the donors, obviously they're contributing a lot, but did they hold a lot of that kind of weight in regards to the direction of the charities as well?

Pat: Yeah, big time. And then what happens if they, the bigger the donor, the more control they have over it. And a lot of the time the board members are major donors. A lot of nonprofits use their boards as fundraising vehicles for the organization. Which is smart on paper, but I've always kind of gravitated away from like the decision making body should be like your core source of funding or else I think they just have way too much control over what is ultimately an institution that they aren't actively participating in enough.

Like it's, it's just too, it's kind of like publicly traded companies where you see sometimes like they seem to be making a decision that's obviously not what's best for the company, but what's best for shareholders. And so, in short, yeah, donors have a big say in it. What will happen sometimes is. If a nonprofit sees a competitor go to that like zero overhead trap which usually comes, it's, it's fake generally.

So what'll happen is you get one big donor, and let's say it costs a million dollars a year to run the charity. The big donor gives you the million, and then you get to say to your donors, every dollar you give goes to the cause. And it's, they're spending the same amount on overhead and salaries and everything, but it's just coming from one person who can like change the narrative.

And then all the other nonprofits We'll worry that all the donors will go to them because they look so much more efficient, and it does happen. So then they start like cutting the operational stuff..

Stephen: Cutting corners to get...

Pat: that actually makes them special.

Stephen: ...get to that. That is, they're so complex, right? You think of like, the cause. Money comes in to fuel the solution for that cause, but just like there are many organizations, as you said, there are many companies. Talk to me about you as a leader, right? You start off, it's you and your co-founder.

I don't know the exact story, maybe not in your basement or garage, but now you've grown this massive, you know, not only impact, but now you have people that report to you, you got, you know, you have a lot more HR issues. Talk to me about your growth over the last six, seven years of being a leader of this organization.

Pat: Yeah. The, the growth curve. In terms of like the internal like folks at the company has been difficult in terms of like allocating resources as efficiently as possible, like trying to put people in a position to be successful. The starting point when we were growing was like we, we hired one guy first, Michael Early, who ended up being like a third co-founder.

And he was a jack of all trades, did everything. And like, that was a good kind of culture move. And then we hired a handful of people who were again, jack of all trades, do a little bit of everything. We're all onboarding and fundraising and, and, and selling and doing all that stuff. And then we got to a tipping point, I would say in in 2020, I think we added like 120 nonprofits.

And then in 2021, we added like a little over a thousand, 2022, a little over a thousand, like that was when the growth really started. And at that point, you have to build like these onboarding teams and you need to build support teams that can provide the quality of support and like the efficiency that you're looking for.

So that's what you see with exchanges where bull market, bear market, you'll see these exchanges add all this talent. And then if the bear market goes down and there's less demand for it, you have to like reshape teams. So that was, I'd say one of the more difficult parts, right? Like trying to grow teams and then cut them back a little bit when, when times aren't as good.

And then, yeah, the, the, we got acquired by a company called Shift4, and then through that merger, we actually added two new pillars, which is we do, Shift4 is this really big payments company, they do like 260 billion a year in payments volume, so just one of those sneaky, it's like 40% of hotels and like a third of restaurants in the U.S. Or something, just like, and now they have all these acquisitions. But helping them get their credit card processing into the nonprofit sector is like a pillar and then doing their credit card processing for crypto companies, which has become this like multi billion dollar processing pillar. So like now we have these arms that we operate for the parent company.

In addition to running the giving block still as a fully independent entity. And they've been an awesome like acquirer, obviously, cause they don't do that all the time. Right. When they take over and they're a chart, like it feels no different than pre acquisition in terms of. Alex and I making our decisions and running the company, but we have some additional responsibilities and folks that we report to on those other pillars outside of it.

So I think, yeah, the hardest part in short was definitely rapid scale ups and trying to bring in enough talent because you start kind of hiring folks that aren't necessarily the best fit out of need sometimes if you're moving too fast. And then if the market goes in a negative direction, then you don't necessarily have the resources to put everyone in a position to be successful and you got to make tough decisions.

Stephen: Which it's guaranteed to do in crypto at least every four years, right? It feels like every four years, you know, you're hitting a cycle. Talk to me about what your main focus at The Giving Block is like. Where do you allocate your resources? Is it marketing, getting the name out there? Is it like, hey, we have more than, you know, enough, you know, we have more than enough demand Bye.

Bye. Now we have to make sure we're putting the policies, procedures in place to make this a more seamless process versus clunky. Like, where do you focus most of your energy on?

Pat: Yeah, I'm mostly focused on the nonprofit side of the house. So just like fundraising, a lot of our nonprofits, the way that we do business, we don't just give them the solution, but we have these like relationships with them that are consultative where we like build fundraising plans for them and run campaigns.

So we, we have all of this work that we have to do to help them fundraise. We don't have like a, just a fully scalable solution offering, you know, like a, a Stripe. So a lot of that work goes down to me and then our strategy team. And then marketing stuff like our campaigns. We run Crypto Giving Tuesday every year.

The month of December is really big. And then throughout the year, we have to run these campaigns and market the charities and go to all the nonprofit conferences while also simultaneously like serving the donor demographic. And then my, my co-founder is more finance tech, like making things actually work.

Stephen: That's interesting. What do you say to a company, an organization, I think of like a nonprofit, like, association for women in crypto, right? They're trying to get more women in the space, but it's membership based. They have sponsors, but they don't exactly accept crypto. And maybe this is just a curiosity, because I know the founder there, so I'm like, oh, like, You know, when I'm looking at what you're doing, I'm like, oh, this seems like a perfect match.

They're dealing with people in crypto on a regular basis. A lot of the companies that are sponsoring them are traditional, but maybe that's the reason why it's traditional companies sponsoring, because some of the crypto companies, you know, don't have an easy way to support them. What would your, you know, if you were speaking to them right now, what would be your suggestion to them to, you know, maybe even continue with a membership basis, but opening up other avenues for revenue?

Pat: Yeah, if you're operating in the crypto space, you should definitely have a, like a crypto option for accepting donations, contributions, sponsorships, just because there's so much inherent alignment there. And then the other thing is like, they might be stuck in the same trap, which is interesting because they're in the crypto space that a lot of nonprofits have been in for a while, where they're like, well, we don't take crypto because Donors don't ask to give us crypto, and it's like, well, that's not really how, like, accepting payments works.

Like, if you didn't have a donate button at the top of your site that had a credit card option, don't you think you'd get less credit card gifts? Like, wouldn't that impact it quite a bit? So they might just be stuck in this thing where they've never suggested, like, crypto as an option to these sponsors.

Where they might be able to, especially if they have 501c3 status, get larger contributions while saving that company actually additional money if they've been holding it on the balance sheet.

Stephen: And how easy would it be that for them to say, okay, like you sold me a pot. You know, but we're, you know, we're busy. We're trying to get, we're busy trying to get donations and throw events and get awareness out there. The last thing we have the technical savvy to do is start accepting crypto. Like how easy is it for you to plug in your solution?

Pat: Yeah. We set up the account like within a day or two, like that's as long as it takes to have it set up for them. And then it's a copy and paste iframe. So if they can, if they've ever embedded a video on something where they've just like pasted something onto a website, that's it. So they just need a page on their site that says donate crypto, like a menu item, something like that.

And then you just paste in the iframe and you're, you're good to go.

Stephen: I love it. I'm going to reach out to them right after that. Amanda Wake, I'm coming for you. I'm reaching out for you. We need crypto added to the association for what's an association for women in crypto. If we can't even accept more money to support such a great cause. Tell us about a, what does the future look like for donation and maybe some of your personal thoughts about the future of crypto.

You're seeing a lot of, you know, ai blockchain based collaborations, or knee deep in Web3 and defi. Give us your state of crypto in the next couple years and like where you would like to see the industry go for for donations as well as crypto

Pat: Yeah. On the, on the crypto front, like I'd like to see continued institutional adoption for sure. Like I, I think Richie Torres put it well, like we need regulators to do more to actually just empower people to be innovative while cutting out the bad actors versus just kind of regulation for the sake of regulation.

Like it seems like the SEC and a lot of these regulars haven't had like a coherent strategy over an extended period of time. So depending on the next administration and their approach to it, I think that'll be one of the big tipping points. Like, how much does it seem like the U.S. Is actually making it a priority to lead on crypto and set up a regulatory framework where companies want to build and lead here?

Institutional adoption from the exchange side, like we have these ETFs. I'd love to see more ETFs coming out. And then obviously the. The inflows, if they keep trending in a positive direction over time and the market stays up, that's good. If crypto prices don't have a massive correction in the near term, which of course like shakes confidence, some of these.

Smaller, healthier corrections and then consolidation periods. I'd love to see that for a little while. So for it to just ride out long enough where it's in the news for a period without a giant collapse afterwards that scares everybody away from it. Now, volatility is obviously trended positive over time, but it's just like anything else.

Like they don't report on it at all until it's approaching new all time highs. That tends to be where close

Stephen: or,

Pat: a bubble of some sort. And that's, you know,

Stephen: drastic 25% dip is usually the, the two new cycles crypto has.

Pat: And that's what everybody buys. Right? That's your grandma and parents and everyone don't buy it until they see it in the news because they're not hanging out with us on Twitter every day.

So I'd love to see that not happen this time and ride it out a bit. And on the donation front, I think the big thing for nonprofits is to probably shift a bit from innovation being innovation in a global sense and focus more on innovation than an internal sense. Like innovation can just be doing something differently.

Based on your standard. It's not like the global standards. A lot of nonprofits will, similar to investors, they don't pay attention to crypto until it's in the news. It's the biggest, hottest, newest thing. They throw money at it and try it for a little bit without nearly kind of the runway to really build a, like a revenue pillar.

And then they're like, oh, that's not a thing that makes sense or works for me. And then they're just out of it forever. I see that happening with AI now. So, I'd love to see nonprofits just like focus on innovation in a sustained way over time, just being like, what are things that we can do to improve our website?

To open up a new social account, to build that over time, just kind of, yeah yeah, baby steps.

I love

Stephen: it. Pat, where can people talk to you if they're like, Hey man, I'm running a not for profit. I feel like I need the concierge white glove service. Where can people reach out to you and get a little bit more insights of you and your team?

Pat: Yeah, if you want to follow me, I'm @thisisPatDuffy on social, so, on X, on LinkedIn. And then in terms of getting in touch with the team, like, I strongly recommend this to everyone. Like, it doesn't matter if you end up working with us, like, I swear to God it doesn't. You could end up doing something different entirely.

But please just go to thegivingblock.com and book a demo. Like just do the Accept Crypto Donations Fund and talk to someone on the team just to get questions answered. Because the number one killer is again, like nonprofits being like, well, I'm trying to update my gift acceptance policy and I don't know which cryptos we should or we shouldn't take.

Or how do I know what countries we take these gifts from? What do we do? How do we sell it? What is the tax receipt I need to write? A lot of this is solved for by technical solutions. So just knowing what actual problems are left for you to resolve internally and figure out, taking 80 % of that off the board is the biggest way to streamline your process and your internal approval process.

So if you're genuinely interested, just sit down with someone who can actually run you through how the product works, how the process works, and it'll just save you those four to six hour Saturdays going down a blockchain rabbit hole.

Stephen: Do you think that's the, it's a mindset thing? They have such a mindset of doing everything themselves, having to grind, you know, struggling to get donations. And That anything new just seems like such a big hurdle.

Pat: Yeah, I think that's part of it. I also think I don't know like what it is about people in general, but this is like, like people want to feel like they know how stuff works and without just asking the people who know. Like I don't, I'm not sure what it is, like everyone wants to like do your own research, which I think could be good in some extent, but like there's so many folks where they're just like, I just know people, they watch the news every day and they're trying to like piece together what's going on or

Stephen: piece together and then they like, they switched their mind every five minutes cause you know, this Democrat said this and now this Republican saying

Pat: this. Yeah,

Stephen: trump likes crypto. So we can't possibly accept crypto now.

Pat: It's stuff like that, but it's, it's that with technology. Like it's sort of, and it's mainly with new technology. Like it's again, like a microwave, Bluetooth, wifi, the phone in your pocket, like how a camera works or television, like there's infinitely complex technologies that everyone's interfacing with all the time, but it's been around a while and there's no one in your life who's like.

I can't buy that computer to, like, show me the source code. Like, it's, it's, nothing works that way at all. But with new things, in particular with crypto, I think even more than AI, it seems like there's this real need to, like, you have this huge educational gap and like, I'm gonna have to spend a lot of time sitting down and reading and learning about this. just not like accurate, you know, like you don't really need like the engine in your car and everything. It's great if you have an engineering mindset and you're curious how it works. It's a value add. I'm not talking to anyone out of it. But I think a lot of people end up in this trap.

Stephen: That's also why there's, you know, you're not jacking up your car and getting under it with a, with a, with a dirty rag either.

Pat: Yeah. It's like, if you, if you know of a mechanic, yeah, like you're saying for the nonprofit industry that like has been doing like everything you're trying to solve for like, they just go talk to them. It's like, my parents will tell me all the time. They're just like, I bought some crypto today. Yeah. Or, oh, we just sold all of our crypto.

I'm like, why wouldn't you talk to me? Do you know what I mean? Like, come talk to me. I, I, I'm in your life. You

Stephen: I'm your crypto guy.

Pat: I could help a little bit with this.

Stephen: Didn't want to bother you, Pat. We didn't want to bother you. We thought you'd tell us to hold.

Pat: yeah, exactly. It's because they, yeah, they're worried about what they're going to hear. But yeah, I would just say that's the big thing. And the same thing with AI and all this other stuff. I know a lot of nonprofit folks who are on the internet trying to do all this research and taking it on social.

Google an AI company and book a demo. Right. Like a momentum in the nonprofit sector, just like go talk to the people about like how their products work and just have someone who does it every day. Unpack it for you. Get the tutorial of the streamline at all.

Stephen: Especially you. Your company's seen all the different types of architecture, organizational structures, you know, regulatory concerns. Like, you've seen the whole gambit. It's not like you're running strictly just for your service. You've, you know, been interacting with You know, the majority of companies have answered all the questions.

It makes sense just to go to you and say, Hey, this is our model. And you'd be like, yeah, we got that model. Here's three companies that are doing it. This is the way they're doing it. These are the issues that they've run into. You have it all there from a company that's seen the majority of these situations.

Pat: Definitely. And sometimes we'll tell you, no, I had a, we gave a presentation yesterday at a conference community boost. They're awesome. And then there was like a nonprofit room that everyone gathered and afterwards to do Q and A and stuff. And there was this really small nonprofit trying to figure out how to add crypto.

And they dropped their website link in there and like the website isn't mobile optimized. And they don't really have a fundraising program that's up and running in any legitimate way. And we're just like, this isn't where you start. Like, here are these other things you can work on. And there are these free things that you could use as like plugins if you absolutely needed it here or there, but you don't need like a whole fundraising program, but like, this is not the position you need to be in.

Like just, I think getting those questions answered is, is probably the best way to start for sure.

Stephen: That's amazing. That's where we'll end the pod. Pat, the second time around it's great having you back. Maybe, let's do it again sooner. Let's not wait three and a half years to get you back the next time. You guys are working on so much and I'm so happy with what you're doing for the industry and helping out nonprofits where otherwise that money would just be sitting there, right?

That, you know, the reason why crypto's at the prices we're seeing it is because of organizations like you that are giving an outlet for people to actually use The technology and use the cryptocurrencies. And this is why we're seeing the prices today. In my belief.

Pat: I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for, for having me on. I listened to a bunch of the podcasts that you've been doing since you took over this year. You're doing an awesome job and the questions you asked today are some of the best I've had in a while. So yeah, just thanks for having.

Stephen: I pride myself in the questions, you know, that's one place I'm not using AI. Uh, I appreciate you so much, Pat.

Pat: Yeah. Thanks Steven.

Stephen: Thank you.