The “Donate Direct” DAO
Donate directly to a family of Ukrainian refugees
I am launching a DAO to bring relief to Ukrainian refugees in Eastern Europe.
I live in Sofia, Bulgaria, and I’ve just been at the Romanian border to collect a mother and a son who just go out of Ukraine.
I did this because my Mexican friend and his daughter flew in to help them get out.
The four of them used to live together in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, until a few months ago, and the Ukrainian kid is like a son to my friend, and brother to his daughter.
Here they are, a few days later, safe in Sofia.
The “Donate Direct” DAO
In 2004 the Tsunami struck.
I was in Shanghai, flew to Thailand and started collecting money from friends and my blog followers.
The proposition was: “whatever you donate, I’ll give to a specific person/family, and I’ll send you a picture of it”.
It was a way for me to create a real connection between the donor and the people getting the help.
I still have some pictures online here, and expense report here (in Italian only, sorry).
This girl was born the day after the Tsunami.
Her name is Klan (Khlụ̄̀n คลื่น), which means “wave”, and is 17 now.
People who donated, told me it was beautiful to be able to see who got their money.
OUR TRIP TO THE UKRAINIAN BORDER
After a long journey under the snow, a night in Bucharest and passing through Transylvania, we made it to the border and met them.
They were brought from the border to a Hotel where people could sleep on a mattress, get food, a data sim card, and further transport to other European countries.
It was very well organized, and the volunteers were fantastic.
Still, many lost women with kids and some grandmas around made the whole thing heart-wrenching.
A few pictures:
WANT TO HELP?
The “Donate Direct” is a transparent, crypto-first initiative.
You can see how much I raised, and who got the money.
Here’s the flow:
1) The money goes in a GNOSIS Safe
We’re in a crypto world now, and we can do things which at the time were not possible.
The money will go to a Gnosis Safe I don’t control, and I’m not part of.
You will be donating to the safe and the funds will be managed by a group of trusted people.
The safe allows having 100% transparency on the money collected.
We will all see how much came in and where it went.
The people managing the safe are a few from Trips Community, Richard Vaughton (a vacation rentals industry veteran), and Matt and Josh from Origin Protocol, a Defi-NFT startup
Read more about them here.
2) Mint an NFT < SUSPENDED
⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️ Please send ETH to the Safe
🐞 Due to a weird technical bug, we lost the 0.7 ETH raised from the NFT mints.
I will pay them myself, so if you donated, don’t worry, your money is going to refugees anyway.
For reference, here’s the 7 minted NFTs.
DONATE TO THE SAFE
👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽👍🏽 Please send ETH to the Safe here below
You can donate ANY amount directly in the safe
0xd1C80B73D4c7b8BdAe9a42963Bb704F4DC4E9DDF
3) Your Donation
If you mint one NFT, I will give them to a specific family, take a picture and publish it on my Twitter account.
You will see exactly where your money went.
How to Donate
Simple:
that’s it.
In most cases, I will aggregate some donations towards one family.
So you will be donating to a family together with other people.
Or, if you mint more than what I give to one family, I’ll share with more people.
Generally, I think $1200 (1000 Euro) per family, is reasonable.
4) The report
After giving away some money, I will take a picture as a proof with the receiver signature.
If you see your address (0x..df) or ENS (like Tripluca.eth), you’ll know you received your donation.
Something like I did in Thailand:
If you have an ENS domain, I’ll write:
“0.1 ETH donated by John.eth to the Adamovich family”.
If not, it will look like:
“0.1 ETH donated by 0x2B575be0Ed84aF8590461a6400C7429cF67f5fc1 to the Adamovich family”.
I’ll also publish a picture and the Etherscan transaction towards them (if not done with Fiat).
I’ll publish each one on Twitter and this will act both as a proof and has a public thank you for your donation.
If they want, I will ask them to share their story, where they come from, where they are going, what they need and so on.
After that, I will also share the contacts (email or social network handles) of the people who receive the donation, so you can get in touch directly.
Maybe you’ll want to help them more, or just know how things are going, and you can do this out of the DAO structure.
Possibly some other people will want to reach them out and help.
We’ll be thus creating a bridge with these people.
5) Expenses
There will be some ETH gas expenses, and other small things I can’t predict.
I won’t obviously pay my self.
6) If you want to help
I want to keep it simple and fast, and it will happen even if I don’t get help.
But if you want to help me, THANKS, here’s what we could do together:
- Bookkeeping: If you can keep track of all money coming in and getting out, it would be a huge help.
- Social Media: we may open a Twitter account/ TG group if someone wants to take care of it.
- Design: a logo would be nice.
- Direct support: some people will be unbanked, so they may need help with setting up wallets, CEXs or crypto-based cards.
- Italian translations: replicating all this for the Italian community would be great.
I can only accept help from extremely independent people: you get one of these tasks and make it your own with close to zero input required from me.
Final Thoughts
If the people fleeing are Russians, Indians or from any other nationality, I will still donate.
I am married to a Thai, live in Bulgaria, my daughter speaks Italian, Thai, Bulgarian and English.
She doesn’t even know what nationally she really is.
And this is good.
We’re past that, or at least we should.
The concept of nation states fighting against each other feels so distant.
This war seems to belong to really another era.
I personally saw the Soviet troops right before they left Prague many years ago, I really thought that time was gone.
This DAO is not about nationalities.
It’s about people being displaced by the acts of centralized entities with too much power and too little humanity.
I want to leverage the power of decentralized networks.
We built money (Bitcoin) out of nothing.
We built banks (the Gnosis Safe) out of nothing
We built new coordination tools (DAOs) out of nothing.
We can use them for something good now, and show the world what we are about.
This is when crypto proves its real value.
MINT THE NFT HERE
⚠️⚠️⚠️⚠️ Do not mint. Please send ETH to the Safe.
☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️☝️
ABOUT ME
I’m Luca De Giglio
Built an Airbnb before Airbnb to fund 10 years of travels.
#Bitcoin Hodler since 2013.
Founder @tripscommunity @Originprotocol partners
tripluca.eth $TRIPS
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