The FTX Foundation for Charitable Giving
FTX has grown tremendously this past year. Our daily volume is averaging $5b, our userbase has grown, and this week we unveiled trading on Blockfolio. Those are just the start; there’s a ton of big things on the horizon.
We are pretty happy with how things have been going in 2021, both for us and for the crypto community as a whole. It’s important in times like these, though, to never lose sight of the fact that revenue and expansion can only ever be step one of a two-step plan; they are not ends in and of themselves.
FTX was founded with the goal of having the largest possible positive impact on the world. That’s why, since the beginning of 2020, the exchange, its affiliates, and its employees have donated tens of millions of dollars to charitable causes, with some among us having pledged to donate the majority of what we make here. We’re proud of that, and we want to do more of it in the years to come.
But as we’ve had more discussions around this topic, we’ve come to realize that something has been missing. It’s a cliché, but we couldn’t have done any of this without you, the users; no company can go without its customers, of course, but the phrase is doubly true in any situation where network effects are at play. And so it feels right that you have a say in where our collective donations go.
That’s why we’ve started the FTX Foundation. Its mission is the same as our mission: to make the world not just a better place, but the best place we can, by thinking hard about where our Dogecoins can do the most good. But we are starting the FTX Foundation with the additional promise that FTX’s users will have a meaningful say in directing its funds.
Money is the unit of caring, and all of us in the community care about cryptocurrencies and better financial systems. What else do we care about? What else should we care about? Tell us; we want to know. We’re excited to see what other perspectives the wider crypto community brings to the challenges our world faces: from global poverty to climate change to existential or catastrophic risks (did somebody say “pandemic”?) to anything else that gets great impact per satoshi.
A lot about the FTX Foundation is still up in the air. We want everybody in the crypto community to be able to express their opinions about where the Foundation should donate, but we also don’t want to give lots of votes to sockpuppet accounts. That’s why, for the time being, our plan is to use the same voting system that we use for letting users choose which tokenized stocks to list next. As for what users are voting on, we’ll start by offering a few options that we think are great, and we’ll be listening for feedback on what’s missing and what users would like to see. Our most important priority here is that all our users feel like they have a say in where the Foundation donates.
How much money will the Foundation receive? That’s also up in the air — but as a start, we’re pledging to allocate 1% of FTX’s revenue from fees to the FTX Foundation. You’ll be able to see the amount pledged tick up in real time. We hope you’ll find it as exciting as we do, to make the progress we make, together, towards step 2 of our two-step plan.
