I thought for “giving tuesday” it might be fun to look at all the BOINC projects which accept crypto donations and see which have had the most donations and which cryptos donated the most. While many projects have donation links, only a handful accept donations in cryptocurrency.

Price are listed according to their current value, as we can’t know for sure when these projects sold their crypto, if ever (as an outgoing transaction could be a sale or spend or simply moving the coins to another wallet they control). For reference, 1 Bitcoin (BTC) is worth around 90k today and a Gridcoin (GRC) is worth around half a cent. So, for example, if a project received Bitcoin valued at 10K and a Bitcoin valued at 20k, their total would be 1.8M since each BTC is now worth 90k.

Prices fluctuate of course. Bitcoin hasn’t been worth less than 20K since 2020 and Gridcoin has only briefly been worth over 2 cents during the altcoin rally of 2017/2018, getting to a high of 18 cents.

To get these numbers, I plugged the donation addresses listed on the websites of BOINC projects into block explorers for Bitcoin and Gridcoin. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a block explorer for Gridcoin that listed total inflows over time, so I just had to use the current balance. YoYo and RNAWorld are only two projects which have never transferred or used any of their BTC.

Crypto donations are tax-advantaged for donors (at least in the US) and can provide us some visibility into the project’s donation status, unlike for example PayPal where we don’t know how many donations they have received. In my survey, 75% or so of BOINC projects accepted some form of monetary donations. As you can see from the numbers below, projects which accept crypto donations, particularly those who accepted them early on, have benefited significantly from them.

RNAWorld and YaFu (same address) https://www.rnaworld.de/rnaworld/donations.php https://yafu.myfirewall.org/yafu/donations.php

$131,000 in BTC

$35 in GRC

SiDock https://www.sidock.si/sidock/
BTC $32
GRC: $40

YoYo@home https://www.rechenkraft.net/yoyo/donations.php:
$129,000 in BTC. One person donated an entire Bitcoin in 2014! That’s where much of this current value comes from.
$340 in GRC

Primegrid https://www.primegrid.com/donations.php
$12,000 BTC

$3,700 in ETH

$55 in GRC

GPUGrid is listed as accepting Bitcoin but I couldn’t find any information about it on their site. I did find an old forum thread where somebody offered 30+ Bitcoins for donations, I bet they wish they’d taken up that opportunity in hindsight.

These projects could probably increase the amount of BTC donations they get if they get a Bitcoin lightning address. Fees on main chain transactions make smaller donations cost prohibitive, but lightning has extremely low fees.

Likewise, projects which add Gridcoin could benefit from Gridcoin’s sidestake feature where Gridcoin users can regularly donate small amounts each time they stake. Due to Gridcoin’s low value though, it would take a lot of Gridcoin to make a meaningful impact on a project. Projects can use Gridcoin like any other crypto by selling it, or they can “rain” it down on (distribute it to) people crunching their project to incentivize and reward additional crunching.