Chapter 3: From the beneficiary's perspective: direct and inclusive aid

The promise of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) is to offer more direct, rapid, and efficient aid to vulnerable populations, particularly the "invisibles" who do not have access to traditional financial systems and those who cannot provide proof of identity. However, this convergence raises significant ethical and structural challenges. The first section (3.1) will address this duality by detailing the financial inclusion mechanisms offered by projects built on Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), while highlighting the peril of crypto-colonialism. This critique highlights the risk that the implementation of digital solutions, often private, reproduces or amplifies historical power dynamics, notably via the "financialization" of displaced populations' data. The second section (3.2) will examine the emergence of Decentralized Micro-finance (Micro-DeFi), which seeks to use Decentralized Finance tools to overcome the inherent limits of traditional microfinance.

3.1 Between better inclusion and the risk of crypto-colonialism

As a pharmakon, to borrow Stiegler's concept[136], Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) reveal their ambivalent nature for beneficiary populations: both a remedy (3.1.1) representing immense transformative potential and a poison (3.1.2) introducing major new ethical and social risks.

3.1.1 Unprecedented inclusion

From the beneficiary's perspective, the advent of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) constitutes a profound break from traditional aid mechanisms. The main advantage lies in the capacity of these tools to effect a radical disintermediation, offering for the first time direct access to financial resources for the most marginalized populations of the global system: the unbanked. The classic philanthropic system indeed runs up against the systemic barrier of necessarily relying on a fiduciary and banking infrastructure to which billions of individuals do not have access. This exclusion forces aid to pass through multiple intermediaries, causing fees, delays, and security risks for the final beneficiary, often forced to collect cash at centralized distribution points.

It is important to specify that DLTs must not be presented as the sole answer to the lack of banking access. Many regions of the world already possess high-performing financial inclusion systems via mobile money (M-Pesa, MTN Mobile Money, Orange Money, Wave, etc.), often more accessible and robust than current crypto solutions. Web3 does not necessarily bring a "first inclusion", but structurally different functionalities: programmability, transparency, global interoperability, and resilience in contexts where conventional financial systems fail. These mechanisms do not replace existing systems but allow for the creation of new financial layers, capable of operating even in the event of a local banking freeze, as in Afghanistan, Myanmar, or Sudan, which constitutes an advantage rarely accessible via traditional mobile money systems.

Crypto-assets, whether stablecoins or cryptocurrencies, provide an alternative, resilient, and universal financial infrastructure. For the beneficiary, the only requirement to access these funds is access to a crypto-asset wallet, most often via a simple mobile phone. This technological simplicity bypasses the need for formal civil identity—a major obstacle for refugees, internally displaced persons, or populations without civil registration.

For the beneficiary of this new kind of aid, the advantages are numerous. Aid can be transferred almost instantly from donor to individual, eliminating the delays inherent in international bank transfers and complex disbursement processes, especially in emergency situations. Transaction fees are significantly reduced compared to traditional remittance services, meaning a greater proportion of donations reaches the beneficiary directly. Although transaction privacy is a key aspect, the immutability and transparency of distributed ledgers allow, under certain conditions, for the tracking of the origin and destination of funds, reinforcing donor confidence and reducing the risks of misappropriation. By receiving funds directly into a crypto-asset wallet, beneficiaries have the freedom and capacity to decide how and when to spend their money, without being constrained by in-kind aid programs or imposed supplier lists; this autonomy reinforces their dignity and power to act on their own situation. Storing funds in a crypto-asset wallet eliminates the need to transport large sums of cash, thereby reducing the risks of theft or extortion, which are frequent in conflict zones or areas of extreme poverty.

Finally, for billions of people who were excluded from the formal financial system, crypto-assets offer a gateway to financial inclusion.

Beyond direct financial inclusion, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) offer a novel solution to a fundamental problem of social exclusion for persons without legal identity—whom the UN agency ecosystem calls the 'invisibles'. For instance, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), working directly with stateless populations and refugees, notes they are often devoid of identity documents and thus 'legally invisible'[138]. Similarly, UNICEF focuses on identity from birth, on the grounds that a 'child who is not registered at birth is invisible to the government. Without proof of identity, children are often excluded from health care, education, and other vital services, and are more vulnerable to exploitation and abuse'[139]. This invisibility affects at least 850 million people worldwide[140]—refugees, stateless persons, displaced populations—who, deprived of state-recognized proof of identity, are prevented not only from accessing banking services but also essential health services, education, and even civil registration, thus perpetuating a cycle of vulnerability and marginalization.

It is in this context that the potential of Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials becomes truly transformative[141]. These technologies allow for the establishment of self-sovereign digital identity. Identifiers are created and managed by the user, who retains total control over them. Different identity property providers can then issue Verifiable Credentials, the proof of source and integrity of which are anchored on a blockchain. Unlike traditional identification systems that depend on a single central authority, this decentralized identity can be built from multiple Verifiable Credentials that contribute to forging a robust digital identity, without any single entity having a monopoly on its validation or revocation. Credential data is not directly stored and exposed on a blockchain (which contains only the traces allowing for their verification) but is ideally recorded locally and directly by the user themselves on their decentralized identity wallet, thus limiting massive centralized data leaks.

By holding ownership and control of their own digital identity, the beneficiary emerges from invisibility and acquires the capacity to prove who they are, in a portable and secure manner, without being subject to the constraints of a single centralized system, which is often inaccessible or failing in crisis zones or for vulnerable populations. This identity autonomy opens access to financial inclusion but can also unlock access to health care, by enabling a secure and shareable medical history; to education, by authenticating diplomas and academic records; and even to forms of civic and economic participation, by enabling proof of digital citizenship or professional skills.

3.1.2 The peril of crypto-colonialism

The rapid development of Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) and crypto-assets in the aid and philanthropy sector, while promising better financial inclusion, also raises serious concerns regarding the reproduction of historical power dynamics, a phenomenon referred to by critics as crypto-colonialism[142].

The critique of digital colonialism targets a social system where a restricted number of influential actors, often technology companies, operate globally and exercise an unequal concentration of power[143]. This system is characterized by the extraction of profits, data, labor, and natural resources, while imposing cultural norms and ensuring dependence on products, all justified by a discourse of progress and benevolence[144].

The term 'crypto-colonialism' specifically describes neo-colonial processes where blockchain technology facilitates new forms of appropriation of resources from the Global South to catalyze economic growth elsewhere. The Global South refers to regions still suffering the effects of past colonial expansion[145].

Although presented as solutions for aid and the improvement of living conditions, digital technologies, including the use of crypto-assets, risk amplifying historical forms of colonization and maintaining power inequalities[146].

One of the most frequently cited illustrations of crypto-colonialism is that of Puerto Rico, studied following Hurricane Maria[147] which struck the island in September 2017, notably by Naomi Klein. The promise of blockchain decentralization was instrumentalized by wealthy investors to test the technology there on a state scale, according to objectives they had defined themselves. This phenomenon is motivated by tax optimization and the promise of transforming the region, which tends to relativize the stated philanthropic objective. The discourses held by investors construe the local population as a colonial and underdeveloped 'other'[148], naturally in need, whose economy must be assisted by outside 'great minds'[149] to transition from an agrarian economy to an information economy. This dynamic maintains and reproduces the existing relationship of colonial domination.

The use of private blockchains in humanitarian aid fits into a pattern not unlike the pitfalls of traditional aid. Researchers[150] point out that the absence of common data protection standards and the legal immunity of UN institutions create 'outsourcing loopholes'[151]. These loopholes allow technology companies to test new solutions, such as biometrics or Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs)—often private ones—on displaced populations without incurring direct liability.

In certain humanitarian programs using blockchain, such as those involving the UNHCR and the World Food Programme with private companies, there is a risk of 'financialization'[152] of information on displaced persons, their data being converted into digital footprints used for verification and transactions.

The biometric crypto-asset project Worldcoin is another representative example of this issue[153]. The company targets fragile populations and unregulated territories in the Global South through aggressive promotional strategies, offering money either in local currency or in crypto-assets in exchange for the collection of biometric data, consisting of an iris scan as well as a facial scan[154]. This process aims to capture markets and extract valuable data by presenting itself as a form of 'social aid'."

The peril of crypto-colonialism lies in the fact that, without a thoughtful and locally grounded approach, technological aid solutions can not only fail to correct inequalities but also reproduce a model of development imposed from the top down, keeping beneficiaries in a state of "permanent assistance" and dependence, rather than fostering the empowerment and sovereignty of local populations, while also, through the use of biometric data with virtually no safeguards, permanently jeopardizing the personal data of millions of people around the world—among those who might still be able to defend themselves.

The paradigm of decentralized identity and Verifiable Credentials is also subject to criticism from academics, such as Margie Cheesman of the University of Oxford, who views these self-sovereign identity systems as "simultaneously the potential catalyst for new modes of empowerment, autonomy, and data security for refugees, and a means of maintaining and extending bureaucratic and commercial power"[156] and for whom, "if self-sovereign identity continues to be routinely depoliticized in the aid sector, the particular ways in which identities are configured, the social biases they instill, and the harmful consequences of this social sorting will be overlooked"[157].

3.2 Towards the emergence of Decentralized Micro-finance (Micro-DeFi)?

Microfinance was designed to include those excluded from the traditional banking system, but it faces significant structural limitations. This chapter examines the inherent limits of traditional microfinance (3.2.1), such as high transaction costs and lack of liquidity, before presenting the opportunities offered by the emergence of Micro-DeFi (3.2.2), which seeks to overcome these obstacles by using Decentralized Finance tools, notably on-chain credit history and access to global liquidity for more transparent funding.

3.2.1 The inherent limits of microfinance

If so-called inclusive finance exists, it is indeed because traditional finance excludes—perhaps because the risk is not worth the cost. It is from this observation that microfinance, a concept born in 1976 within traditional finance and awarded a Nobel Prize in 2006, came into being.

The modern history of microfinance is inseparable from that of Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist. In the 1970s, while Bangladesh was struck by famine, Yunus was a professor of economics at the University of Chittagong. Struck by the discrepancy between the grand economic theories he taught and the misery he observed, he realized that poor craftswomen could not buy their raw materials for lack of a few dollars and were exploited by pawnbrokers. In 1976, he decided to personally lend the equivalent of 27 dollars to a group of 42 women. All of them repaid him. This experience led him to create the Grameen Bank in 1983—the "village bank"—whose model relies on trust and solidarity. Loans are granted without material collateral, often to groups of women who act as guarantors for one another, in the form of a joint liability group. This approach not only ensures very high repayment rates, often exceeding 95%, but also strengthens social bonds and the empowerment of women, who constitute the vast majority of borrowers. For this innovation, Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, enshrining microfinance as a major tool in the fight against poverty.

Microfinance thus refers to the range of financial services—micro-credit, micro-savings, micro-insurance—intended for low-income individuals, generally in the Global South, who do not have access to traditional banks. The fundamental idea is that even very small sums can enable individuals to start or develop an income-generating activity, and thus improve their living conditions. Since its inception, microfinance has experienced exponential growth and has widely spread beyond the Grameen Bank, through NGOs but also commercial banks, cooperatives, microfinance institutions (MFIs), and for-profit crowdfunding platforms.

The impact of microfinance can be measured on several levels. In 2019, the number of microfinance clients worldwide was estimated at over 140 million, with a global loan portfolio of nearly 124 billion dollars. For many "micro-entrepreneurs", access to credit, however modest, is the starting point for an activity such as buying livestock, a sewing machine, goods for a small business, or seeds for a farmer. This micro-capital allows them to generate income, smooth their consumption, and cope with unforeseen events. Beyond the purely economic aspect, microfinance also has profound social impacts. It contributes to the empowerment of individuals, particularly women, who, by managing their own activity, gain independence, confidence, and status within their families and communities. Additional income is often invested in children's education and the improvement of household health and nutrition. Microfinance played a pioneering role in financial inclusion and demonstrated that it was possible and profitable to provide financial services to the poorest, paving the way for other innovations like "mobile banking", which is experiencing resounding success in Africa and Asia.

But this optimistic vision must not obscure a certain number of limitations and pitfalls observed on the ground and widely documented. One of the main criticisms leveled at microfinance today is the often very high level of interest rates. While microfinance institutions justify these rates by significant operational costs, such as managing numerous small loans or monitoring clients in rural areas, they can reach levels of 30%, 50%, or even over 77% per year in some cases[158]. Such rates transform a tool of emancipation into a trap, and many borrowers, struggling to generate sufficient profits to repay their loan, find themselves forced to take out a new credit to repay the previous one, thus entering a spiral of over-indebtedness. This phenomenon was particularly visible during the Andhra Pradesh crisis in India in 2010, where aggressive lending practices and usurious rates led to a wave of suicides among over-indebted farmers, casting lasting discredit on the sector.

"Added to this are forms of social pressure, sometimes excessive, in joint liability mechanisms such as daily visits, community stigma in case of delay, the exclusion of women's groups, or even coercive collection practices. These dynamics, documented by the World Bank[159] and the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)[160], show that microfinance can reinforce certain vulnerabilities instead of alleviating them,"[161] explains Inès d'Haultfoeuille.

Furthermore, microfinance struggles to reach the poorest of the poor. Microfinance institutions, concerned with their financial viability, tend to lend to those who already have a small activity and a certain repayment capacity. The most destitute, marginalized, and vulnerable populations, such as the homeless and the sick, are excluded from these programs because they are deemed too risky[162]. Moreover, numerous impact studies[163] have shown that while microcredit helps smooth consumption and cope with shocks, it has a much more modest effect on sustainably escaping poverty[164].

Most funded activities remain very low value-added subsistence activities, which do not allow for real capital accumulation or job creation[165]. Microcredit helps manage poverty, but it is not always sufficient to escape it.

At the macroeconomic level, several analyses, notably from CGAP[166]—a global partnership housed within the World Bank—and the Overseas Development Institute[167] (ODI), highlight that the positive effects of microfinance are largely neutralized as soon as contexts become unstable: inflation, local currency depreciation, climate risks, political crises. This discrepancy between punctual micro-economic impacts and the absence of sustainable structuring effects constitutes a major limitation.

The entry of commercial actors and investors with a profit motive into the microfinance sector has led to what is called "mission drift". Attracted by the potential profitability of the "market of the poor", some institutions have applied the same principles to microfinance as in speculative finance, prioritizing maximum profitability and profit optimization to the detriment of social impact. This drift results in a concentration of loans on the "least poor and most profitable" clients, sometimes brutal collection practices, and the abandonment of non-financial services—notably training, literacy, and health awareness programs—which were nevertheless at the heart of the initial Grameen Bank model. A part of microfinance is now simply a banking activity targeted at the poor, and no longer a social development tool.

That said, microfinance cannot solve everything on its own. As a financial tool, it will never be able to solve the structural problems that trap some in poverty, such as the lack of infrastructure, roads, electricity, access to water, deficiencies in health and education systems, political instability or corruption, or deep inequalities, whether of gender, caste, or ethnicity. Without a favorable environment and strong public policies in these areas, the impact of microfinance will remain intrinsically limited. A micro-entrepreneur may have access to credit, but if no road allows them to transport their products to market, their activity will never be able to prosper. Microfinance is a powerful tool that has changed the lives of millions of people by giving them access to financial services and fostering their autonomy. Muhammad Yunus's legacy is immense. But nearly fifty years after his first experiments, microfinance is hitting its own boundaries: market saturation, rising climate risks affecting repayment capacity, increased dependence on costly capital, and an inability to reach the most precarious households.

The question arising in 2025 is the following: Could Decentralized Finance (DeFi) tools simply optimize the profitability of a traditional finance that has now integrated microfinance as a profit center, or would they allow for a reconnection with the genesis of the values upheld by the Grameen Bank? More broadly, can they correct certain systemic failures of the sector—lack of transparency, opaque risk management, high transaction costs, dependence on local institutions—or do they risk, on the contrary, reproducing the same biases in another form?

Moving beyond the myth of the miracle solution, what is the impact of crypto-assets on microfinance, and how do they provide an answer to specific issues—notably over-indebtedness and commercial drift? are we witnessing the emergence of a Decentralized Micro Finance, and if so, what is it?

3.2.2 The emergence of a Micro-DeFi?

Micro-DeFi uses Decentralized Finance (DeFi) tools to attempt to overcome certain obstacles of traditional microfinance. It proposes not only a new financial infrastructure but also an experimental model, still immature, whose promises must be analyzed with caution regarding technical, governance, and regulatory risks.

These advantages can include reducing transaction costs, accessing better global liquidity, recording an on-chain credit history for the micro-borrower, and ensuring total transparency of funds linked to digital wallets and public crypto-asset addresses—that is, as long as they remain in the form of tokens. Smart contracts automate loan management, notably disbursement, interest calculation, and repayment tracking, making very small loans economically viable, which would be too costly for a classic bank to manage. Liquidity pools, fed by investors from around the world, can fund local micro-entrepreneurs without borders. Transaction after transaction, a farmer builds a verifiable financial reputation on a public blockchain. This on-chain credit history will serve to prove their reliability to obtain another micro-loan, even without a traditional bank account. Lenders, whether individuals or organizations, can see exactly where their money is going and track repayment rates in real time, thereby reinforcing trust. However, the quality of this information depends on how external data interacts with data recorded in a distributed ledger. Without reliable verification mechanisms, this on-chain transparency does not necessarily guarantee reality, which can create new risks of information asymmetry.

For hundreds of millions of people living in the informal economy worldwide, access to microcredit is impossible because interest rates are often prohibitive. Micro-DeFi does not eliminate this risk but can contribute to reducing it by lowering the cost of capital, provided that liquidity reserves remain sufficiently supplied and that the volatility of mobilized assets is controlled—two conditions far from guaranteed in current Decentralized Finance (DeFi) environments.

Mercy Corps Ventures piloted a project aimed at making loans more accessible, in collaboration with Quipu, a Colombian player connecting DeFi liquidity to traditional microfinance institutions, and Anzi Finance, a blockchain platform managing guarantee funds and credit risk[168]. The capital, provided in the form of USDC stablecoins by DeFi lenders, was routed via the Nudo protocol to a local microfinance institution, Bancuadra[169], dependent on the Colombian administration. The latter was then responsible for distributing loans in local currency to entrepreneurs. The true innovation lies in risk management. To encourage traditional lenders to participate, Mercy Corps Ventures provided so-called "first-loss" capital.

Concretely, this tranche of capital, placed in a smart contract, acts as a shield absorbing the first payment defaults. This safety net significantly reduced the risk for other investors, making lending to micro-entrepreneurs much more attractive. Thanks to this structure, the project was able to lower the cost of capital for the partner microfinance institution, which in turn could offer loans at interest rates much lower than those of the market. Thus, more than 80% of entrepreneurs who benefited from a loan stated that it would have been impossible for them to obtain similar financing from other sources. This injection of capital had a direct impact, with 75% of them reporting an increase in their income.

This model actually illustrates the impact of Decentralized Finance on micro-credit organizations, and the role of indirect financial aid provided by Mercy Corps Ventures. By creating a system where capital is both productive for the borrower and secured for the lender, this approach opens new perspectives for experiments whose object would be broader financial inclusion than the current one. However, this type of financial architecture relies on Decentralized Finance (DeFi) protocols whose security is both critical and a major stake: a bug in a smart contract, a loss of a stablecoin's peg to a fiat currency, or an attack on the computer protocol could jeopardize the system's liquidity, reminding us that these innovations remain dependent on technical infrastructures that are still young and sometimes immature.

Tech deep diveAnzi Finance is built on an EVM sidechain of the XRP Ledger blockchain. Quipu is a credit protocol for Real-World Assets (RWA). It is a decentralized platform that connects, via a protocol called Nudo, DeFi liquidity pools to real-world microfinance institutions and serves as a bridge so that capital denominated in stablecoins can be used to grant loans in local currency to micro-entrepreneurs.

There are several companies and experiments that could be described as Micro-DeFi, such as Ethichub[170], a Spanish company that has distributed more than 600 loans totaling 5 million dollars to more than 10,000 small farmers in six countries, especially in Mexico, or Hiveonline[171], a platform operating in several African countries, like Mozambique and Zambia, which uses the Stellar public blockchain to create verifiable financial identities and credit histories for thousands of small farmers—mainly women—from community savings and credit groups.

These projects nevertheless remain on a still limited scale and raise a central question: can Micro-DeFi be deployed massively without reproducing the commercial or speculative drifts that have weakened traditional microfinance, particularly when investors seek high returns rather than social impact?

Thus, Micro-DeFi does not position itself as a simplistic alternative to classic microcredit or mobile money, but as a complementary infrastructure capable of reducing certain systemic biases: cost of capital, lack of reliable data, dependence on local banks, opacity of risk, or even commercial drift. It opens up real opportunities but also introduces new risks—technological, financial, and social alike—which must be evaluated rigorously to avoid substituting one fragile system for another.

Tech deep diveFrom a technical standpoint, the Nouns DAO uses a fork of Compound's governance[267] and constitutes the main governing body of the Nouns ecosystem. The Nouns DAO treasury receives 100% of the ETH revenue from the daily Nouns auctions. Each Noun is an irrevocable member of the Nouns DAO and entitles the holder to one vote for all governance matters. Nouns voting rights are non-transferable (if you sell your Noun, the voting right is ceded with it) but they are delegatable, meaning you can assign your voting right to someone else as long as you own your Noun. Nouns are stored directly on Ethereum and do not use pointers to other networks such as IPFS, because the components of the Nouns are compressed and stored on-chain using custom Run-Length Encoding (RLE), which is a form of lossless compression.

This model is only one of the possible incarnations of a philanthropic DAO. The report by the Haut Comité Juridique de la Place Financière de Paris notes that DAOs can be "charitable or humanitarian", and other structures are emerging. For example, the Big Green DAO (see supra), initiated by the Big Green Foundation, uses the governance structure of a DAO to facilitate the management and allocation of grants in the field of food sovereignty, aiming to subvert the traditional relationship between donors and beneficiaries by giving voting power to practitioners on the ground. While NounsDAO represents a direct governance model linked to the possession of a unique asset, other DAOs explore systems based on vote weighting by fungible tokens or reputation, opening a vast field of experimentation for a more democratic philanthropy.

From digital assets like NFTs to immersive virtual worlds, the transition is natural. Video games and metaverses, built on similar logics of digital ownership and community interaction, constitute the next frontier to explore for philanthropy.

6.2 Philanthropy through interaction: Gaming, Trading, and Metaverses

Virtual worlds, gaming, and charitable trading constitute innovative approaches to engage and raise awareness among new generations thanks to interactive and immersive experiences fostering a strong sense of community.

6.2.1 Play-to-Give and Trade-to-Give

The concept of "playing to give", or Play-to-give in Web3 video games, where gameplay directly and automatically generates funds for charitable causes, is still emerging and rarely implemented as a passive game mechanic. However, this model illustrates one of the ways crypto philanthropy is inviting itself into the heart of communities whose audience is very far from traditional methods of appealing to generosity but obviously just as receptive to humanitarian crises.

The most documented example of Play-to-give is the strong mobilization of a community of gamers within the Web3 video game Axie Infinity[268], following the passage of Typhoon Rai in the Philippines in December 2021. Axie Infinity is a video game whose concept is akin to that of Pokémon. Players collect small creatures named Axies, engage them in battles, and can breed them to generate new ones. The major distinction lies in the fact that each creature is a unique digital object truly owned by the player, comparable to a collectible card, and can thus be bought and sold for real money to other players.

Several teams, called guilds, gathering individual players and NFT artists from the ecosystem, mobilized to collect funds for the typhoon victims[269]. The largest game guild, named the Yield Guild Games (YGG), first launched a donation campaign named "crypto-ayuda" (crypto aid), with an initial donation of 2.5 ETH, worth nearly 500,000 Philippine pesos at the time, to fund a medical mission on the devastated island of Siargao. Then an influential Filipino player, named Nix Eniego, declared donating all his game earnings to help the victims. Charity streams were organized, collecting several tens of thousands of Philippine pesos transferred to the management of the Yield Guild Games (YGG). Artists from the community sold NFT works, pledging to donate all profits to organizations on the ground. In parallel, a major charity tournament, the "United Gamers Guild (UGG) All-Stars Tournament", was organized and broadcast live to amplify the collection. Thanks to the convergence of all these initiatives—direct donations, charity streamings, tournaments, and NFT sales—the Axie Infinity community raised over 28.6 million Philippine pesos, the equivalent of 572,000 US dollars at the time, to help the typhoon victims.

While this example remains anecdotal, the philanthropic potential of Web3 video games seems as significant as it is uncertain. It is also hindered by the same challenges that characterize broader Web3 adoption: technical complexity, regulatory uncertainty, and the need to create fluid user experiences for an uninitiated audience.

Another initiative at the crossroads of trading and streaming for charitable fundraising purposes is charitable trading. While charitable trading is a philanthropy model widely deployed in the United States, consisting of dedicating all or part of the profits generated by financial speculation activities to one or more charities, the model has been developed in the crypto-asset universe. In June 2021, a pioneering initiative in France, led by Alexandre Chkirate, with the support of Binance Charity[270] and Paymium[271], transposed the concept of charitable trading into the Web3 universe. The first trading marathon was organized by the association Crypto4Good, in partnership with the platform Kryll.io[272], during which, for 24 hours without interruption, the event, broadcast live on Twitch, gathered 3,200 viewers, creating a "crypto" version of traditional telethons or the Z Event[273]. The objective was to mobilize a community around a streaming that was both educational and supportive, where several teams of traders competed to generate maximum profits, with all earnings generated, as well as donations collected from the audience during the event, distributed to charities. Thus, the associations Restos du Cœur and Entraide et Partage were able to share the 36,000 € raised across five cities in France: Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Lille, and Bordeaux. The event not only allowed for innovative fundraising but also played a role in popularization, inviting well-known figures from the French-speaking crypto community like Hasheur[274], Sébastien Borget of The Sandbox, or Thibaut de Meria, to comment on and analyze the traders' strategies in real-time[275].

6.2.2 Metaverses

A metaverse designates a persistent and shared virtual space where users, via avatars, can interact with each other and with digital objects[276]. These immersive 3D environments aim to simulate or extend aspects of the real world, offering new types of social interactions across various registers, ranging from entertainment to professional, educational, or commercial applications. Persistence means the metaverse continues to exist and evolve even when users are not logged in, maintaining the state of interactions and objects. Sharing implies that many users can connect simultaneously and interact within the same space. Avatars are the digital representations of users, allowing them to immerse themselves and act in this virtual world, with virtual reality headsets being the fetish devices. Beyond video games, which are often the precursors, the concept of metaverse encompasses a broader vision of an embodied and decentralized internet, where ownership of digital assets and new forms of governance play a growing role. The promise of metaverses is to offer other ways of working, learning, socializing, and consuming, by blurring the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds.

For the philanthropic sector, it represents a new channel to run awareness campaigns, organize fundraising events, and engage committed communities without the geographic constraints of the physical world. Here are some of the experiments tested by the Red Cross, the RadicalxChange Foundation, or the WWF in Germany.

In December 2023, a Parisian communication agency approached the French Red Cross and The Sandbox to explore an original use case of crypto-philanthropy experimentation via gamification and NFTs within a metaverse. Born in 2011, The Sandbox was first a 2D online video game allowing the creation of Pixel Art-type maps, then a metaverse running on the Ethereum blockchain, where users can create, customize, and trade digital elements like land, objects, and avatars. This virtual world is a decentralized and community platform, allowing everyone to design their own game experiences and interactive content using tools. In The Sandbox, everything is tokenized[277], notably land parcels (called LAND), land assemblies (ESTATE), as well as other digital objects, which are NFTs, certifying their ownership and authenticity. The internal currency of the metaverse is the SAND token, a crypto-asset used for all transactions in The Sandbox, such as buying land, objects, or services. This token can also be earned by playing and participating in activities, making The Sandbox a "play-to-earn" game. Furthermore, SAND holders participate in the project's governance via a Decentralized Organization, a DAO, allowing them to vote on decisions and evolutions of the metaverse.

The main objective of this Red Cross foray into The Sandbox metaverse was to raise awareness among younger generations, Gen Z and Gen Alpha, about the Red Cross missions, using the Play-to-Give mechanic. Indeed, the challenge today is "to know how associations can attract the new generation, how to capture their attention, when usual communication channels like newsletters, postal mail, websites, and mobile apps no longer really engage. People also want to better understand what the association's mission is, how the money will be spent, and what the impact will be. And video games are an excellent medium for that,"[278] explains Sébastien Borget, founder of The Sandbox.

The experience was structured around a gamification of the volunteer journey. The operational model relied on players purchasing digital assets in the form of NFTs linked to the project within The Sandbox's virtual environment. To maximize the multiplier effect of the crypto donation and encourage players to buy NFTs, The Sandbox pledged to match the funds collected through this initiative. Specifically, for every SAND token spent by players to acquire project-linked NFTs, The Sandbox committed to donating an equivalent amount to the Red Cross.

Within the framework of implementing new Web3-specific voting, funding, and governance models, the RadicalxChange Foundation, a US non-profit organization, initiated a collaboration with the platform The Sandbox. This pilot project aimed to collaborate with the crypto-native community of players on The Sandbox metaverse and test these virtual environments as vectors for raising awareness about the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and also as funding channels for civil society organizations in the Global South. For The Sandbox, "it was about increasing the visibility of social impact games, experimenting with a Web3 donation model for NGOs, and aligning The Sandbox with global causes such as education and health in disadvantaged regions."[279] The project was structured in two distinct phases: a first phase dedicated to creation by developers, followed by a charitable engagement phase called "play-to-give". The initial phase of the program began in April 2024 with a virtual hackathon[280], the Impact Game Jam[281], whose objective was to mobilize the creativity of software developers to design playful experiences while integrating the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into their game mechanics. This initiative gathered 425 participants from 17 countries, resulting in the creation of 36 original games and the nomination of 10 winners.

An innovative aspect of the project lies in the selection method of the winners. In accordance with models promoted and experimented by the RadicalxChange Foundation, the community did not proceed with a simple majority vote, but used Quadratic Voting (akin to quadratic funding - see 1.2) to "elect" the game experiences that were then deployed during the second phase.

The second phase, financial and oriented "play-to-give", began in June 2025 by leveraging the three winning games from the first phase vote. The Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) of The Sandbox voted to allocate 30,000 SAND tokens, the platform's native crypto-asset, to constitute the Prize Pool. A fundraiser was organized among metaverse players, who bought NFTs, acquiring items usable in the game. They also had the opportunity to donate directly to the associations. The two winners, and beneficiaries of the donation campaign, the associations Clinic+[283] in Guinea and Puerta18[284] in Argentina, received specific support, revealing in the process the necessary education of beneficiary structures in crypto-asset treasury management, and notably, the creation of wallets, their security, and the conversion of crypto-assets into local currencies. This initiative constitutes less an immediate massive funding solution than an experimental laboratory for new, unprecedented models of governance and value distribution.

The final example is that of the German branch of the WWF, in partnership with the organization Savespecies and the metaverse platform Journee. Together, they launched an immersive and award-winning virtual exhibition named #OceanDetox[285]. Launched on the occasion of World Cleanup Day on September 17, 2022, this experience aimed to raise awareness among the public, and particularly younger generations, about ocean plastic pollution in an innovative and engaging way. Accessible for free from any browser, the exhibition transported users into a virtual world where they could explore a digital marine environment. The centerpiece of this experience was an animated whale, designed realistically and made up of 50 floating plastic waste objects. This strong artistic representation, created by artist Etienne Kiefer of Savespecies, strikingly illustrated the scale of the crisis.