Christian Maloba needed a job. It was February 2021, and he was a 29-year-old student in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Maloba was taking online classes at BYU Idaho and had some time to spare, so he created a profile on the freelance platform Upwork, offering translation services. He wasn’t having much luck until a strange message popped into his inbox from someone named Joe Waltman.
“The nature of the project is likely quite different from what you normally do on Upwork,” Waltman’s message read. “But, if it appeals to you, it could be very rewarding and may allow you to help people in your community.”
Waltman led an organization called GiveCrypto. He explained the outfit was looking for “ambassadors,” and he’d reached out because Maloba lived in a country that scored low on the economic freedom index—a ranking put together by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
Maloba’s job would be to find people in need who lived near enough he could visit them regularly. He would have to set them up with crypto wallets and figure out a way for them to convert donations in the cryptocurrency Ether to the Congolese franc. After each recipient received around $100 from GiveCrypto, Maloba would have to document how they spent the money. GiveCrypto would pay him $30.
“I definitely thought it was a scam,” Maloba later told Fortune. Regardless, he needed work and had been interested in crypto for a few years, so he agreed to the terms. He was an ambassador for GiveCrypto.
What Maloba did not know was that he was joining an organization tied to Coinbase, one of the biggest crypto companies in the world. Coinbase created GiveCrypto in June 2018 and introduced it with great fanfare. Founder Brian Armstrong published a lengthy blog post where he argued that for cryptocurrency to gain mainstream adoption, it needed to be distributed directly to those in need. GiveCrypto would function as a direct giving organization, distributing cryptocurrency across the world through local “ambassadors.”
Courtesy of Christian Maloba
“If there is enough density in certain regions, we may be able to spark local crypto economies,” Armstong wrote.
Armstrong had raised $3.5 million for the project, including $1 million of his own money. He proclaimed the goal was to grow GiveCrypto’s total pot to $1 billion in just two years. A few months later, Armstrong wrote in a separate post that GiveCrypto had hired Joe Waltman, a serial entrepreneur, as its first executive director.
“GiveCrypto was started with the goal of financially empowering those in need around the world through crypto,” a Coinbase spokesperson told Fortune.
Coinbase would be joining a storied, albeit incipient, lineage of crypto philanthropy, such as the Pineapple Fund, which had launched in 2017 to give away tens of millions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin to nonprofits. Despite Armstrong’s lofty promises, GiveCrypto would come to represent the dark side of crypto-based charity—a mess of illogical coordination, misplaced assurances, and unpaid labor.
“It connects all of the worst bits of the sharing economy and the gig economy to the worst parts of cryptocurrency,” said Peter Howson, an assistant professor of international development at Northumbria University. “And then obviously the outcome is horrific.”
A question of adoption
Maloba had a front-row seat to crypto philanthropy gone wrong.
After setting up a Coinbase wallet at Waltman’s instruction, Maloba figured out a way to transfer ETH into the Congolese franc through a local exchange agent who would charge a small exchange fee. He found three people in his community that he thought would benefit from the money and helped them get set up with wallets.
“For a regular person, it was so complicated,” Maloba said. He had heard about other NGOs that operated in the area, distributing money in fiat currency, and he remembered thinking that would be much simpler. Even so, he understood that crypto education was part of the mission, so he was happy to act out his title of “ambassador.”
“We even planned to have classes where people would come together and I would tell them what crypto is and how to use it,” he told Fortune.
According to Howson, using philanthropy as a means of disseminating crypto’s mission—and onboarding new users—has been a dynamic since the first days of the technology. Back when Bitcoin was restricted to niche online communities and Internet Relay Chat discussions, an early heated debate centered around whether Bitcoin should be used as a funding tool for the embattled Wikileaks as a vector for spreading the cryptocurrency’s libertarian and cyberpunk ideology.
One of the last posts from Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamato, was an impassioned plea in late 2010 for Wikileaks to not try and use Bitcoin. “The heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage,” they wrote.
Wikileaks would still establish a Bitcoin payments channel a few months later, with Julian Assange later citing the cryptocurrency as crucial for the site’s continued existence.
In reality, Bitcoin and Wikileaks needed each other, Howson said. “Bitcoin couldn’t have ascended in popularity without Wikileaks,” he told Fortune. “It made Bitcoin legitimate.”
In the ensuing years, crypto philanthropy projects would pop up during boom cycles. The most famous example was the Pineapple Fund, set up in 2017 by an anonymous individual who pledged to give away over 5,000 Bitcoins—at the time worth over $85 million—to charities focused on everything from psychedelic therapy to environmental conservation. The fund’s creator claimed to have donated all of the Bitcoins in a Reddit post in May 2018.
“Bitcoin couldn’t have ascended in popularity without Wikileaks. It made Bitcoin legitimate.”
Peter Howson, assistant professor of international development at Northumbria University
Alex Wilson, the co-founder of a company called The Giving Block that helps charities accept donations in cryptocurrencies, was inspired by the Pineapple Fund to create his own endeavor.
“We think crypto philanthropy is good for crypto adoption,” he said. “It creates this virtuous cycle of great press and getting people interested in crypto, which creates more crypto donors.”
Howson took a decidedly more cynical view, especially as major exchanges like Coinbase and Binance launched their own philanthropy initiatives.
“They’re just paying for lots of advertising space and saying, ‘Look at all the good we’re doing,’” Howson said. “Really, all they’re doing is trying to increase adoption and recruit new suckers.”
Where’s the money?
Just a couple of weeks after Waltman first contacted him, Maloba wrote back to say the process was complete—the money had been distributed, and Maloba requested his $30 payment through Upwork.
Waltman asked Maloba to collect photos and videos of the people using the money, which Maloba recorded. One recipient was able to pay rent on his house for four months. Another used GiveCrypto’s donation for academic fees and food, and the third to pay medical bills for his sick child.
Screenshot from GiveCrypto.org
“I felt like an angel coming to the rescue,” Maloba said.
The next month, March 2021, Waltman told Maloba that because of his great work, Maloba would be allowed to invite 10 more people from his community to receive crypto payments.
“Unfortunately, we can’t pay you more for this, but you will be able to help people in your community,” Waltman wrote.
Maloba was conflicted. He’d initially gotten the job through Upwork after all, but he saw the positive impact of the transfers, despite the amount of work on his end.
“All is well since it’s going to help people in need in my country,” Maloba responded on Upwork. “I’m still positive and hoping that I will also get something in return maybe later, hopefully.”
“There definitely may be opportunity down the road,” Waltman replied. “Thanks for being open-minded.”
From conversations with five other global ambassadors, Fortune learned that GiveCrypto not paying ambassadors—or abruptly cutting off payments without notice—was pervasive.
Alejandro Antich Zapata, a 33-year-old in Venezuela—where GiveCrypto mainly operated—started working with the organization in March 2019. This was during an earlier phase of the project, and Antich’s role had a much wider scope than Maloba’s. At his peak operation, Antich was working more than 40 hours a week to find recipients for payments, with the initiatives ultimately helping around 7,200 people. Unlike Maloba, GiveCrypto paid Antich a monthly salary in ETH—around $400 initially, which later increased to $600.
It was Antich’s primary source of income, at least until the pandemic hit. In March 2020, GiveCrypto stopped operating in Venezuela without telling Antich.
“I didn’t receive any explanation, notification, or even a message from GiveCrypto,” he told Fortune. “It was confusing for me because I was not ‘fired,’ or informed in any way about the future of the projects.”
Another Venezuelan ambassador, a 30-year-old named Humberto Urdaneta, said that during a particularly intensive phase of the project, in September 2019, he was working 12 hours a day without breaks due to the complexity of managing the money transfers and banking problems. He was helping around 100…
