Why Endaoment is Built on Public Infrastructure
By Endaoment
We keep ordinary nonprofit books, and we back them with a public, dollar-denominated record anyone can check.
When a charitable gift moves, you should be able to confirm that it moved. A donor-advised fund already asks you to trust a sponsoring organization with legal ownership of the assets. That trust is real, and it should be earned in public. Most donors are never told they can expect that.
We're still a 501(c)(3) sponsoring organization of donor-advised funds. If you want the full picture of who we are, how a fund works, and what we file each year, start with What Is Endaoment? Turning Gifts Into Grants. This piece is the next step: what it means that Endaoment runs on public infrastructure.
How ordinary books work
Every serious organization already keeps books. Double-entry accounting means every dollar that leaves one account has to show up in another: debit and credit. That is how we, our auditors, and the IRS already look at Endaoment. We file a Form 990, and we complete an independent financial audit. The classic compliance work is still here. We treat it as a point of pride, not a box we skipped.
A public third record
Private books still ask the public to trust the institution that keeps them, and they are usually visible only in select moments: a year-end report, a screenshot, a statement if you know to ask. When the money is charitable, that is a thin answer. A donor, an auditor, a journalist, or a regulator cannot independently confirm a movement if the only record lives on servers we control.
Public infrastructure is the third record. We run the actual movement of dollars on a public network that we do not solely operate. That network is a blockchain: many independent computers keep the same ledger. We publish the programs that move the money. Those programs are called smart contracts, and they have been reviewed by OpenZeppelin and Least Authority. The live network we use today is Base, built on Ethereum.
Our accounts are kept in dollars. Donated stock, digital assets, or cash converts into USDC, a stablecoin: digital dollars issued by Circle and backed 1:1. One dollar in is one dollar on the ledger.
One gift, from donation to grant
When a donor gives an appreciated asset, often stock, we convert it to USDC. Those digital dollars are deposited into the fund's onchain account: the unique smart contract for that donor-advised fund. Our internal ledger records the same gift: debit USDC, credit the fund.
Later, when the donor recommends a grant, we still do human diligence on the nonprofit. When the grant is approved, the protocol moves USDC out of the fund. Our books record the grant, and the public chain records it too, so anyone can look the movement up. Donor identity stays protected. The public ledger uses anonymous identifiers, not names.
Triple-entry
That pairing is called triple-entry accounting. First entry and second entry are our double-entry books. Third entry is the onchain receipt written by the protocol, which neither we nor the donor can quietly rewrite. Auditors reconcile the two. The argument for public infrastructure is a shared, dollar-denominated receipt for charitable money.
What the chain does not replace
The chain does not replace the sponsoring organization. We still take legal ownership of the gift, hold variance power, vet grantees, issue receipts, and file the 990. When a gift is complex, it is our people who stay with it. The chain backs the books. It does not run the charity.
What follows from that
Because the movement is already in digital dollars on a shared network, grants do not wait on a stack of correspondent banks reconciling private ledgers. Some grants leave immediately. Most leave in under 36 hours. Because the third record is public, we spend less time proving our own math to ourselves. The Endaoment API sits on that same source of truth.
If you want to look for yourself, start with endaoment.org and the live numbers at impact.endaoment.org. As of August 2026, about 84% of all impact generated to date has already gone out as paid grants. We're proud of that throughput, and we want DAF holders to keep putting their funds to work. The published programs live in our documentation, including the contracts on Base. You can inspect the Registry, the hub of the system, on Basescan. For who we are as a 501(c)(3), read What Is Endaoment? Turning Gifts Into Grants. If you have questions, our partnerships team is always glad to talk.
Endaoment does not provide tax or legal advice. Please consult your own CPA or attorney about your specific situation.
About Endaoment: Endaoment is a nonprofit that provides the technology and services for turning investments into impact. We are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and a national sponsoring organization of donor-advised funds, giving platforms and donors alike the infrastructure to convert any asset, from cash, stocks, and bonds to crypto and alternative assets like private equity, real estate, and pre-IPO shares, into transparent, tax-deductible support for any of more than 1.8 million nonprofits, with every gift independently verifiable onchain. Advisors and donors can give any asset through the Endaoment App, and builders can embed giving into their own products through our modular API. Learn more at endaoment.org.
