One week after the Wikimedia Foundation announced that it was now able to start receiving contributions for the online encyclopedia in bitcoin, it was discovered Thursday that the non-profit organization has raised more than $140,000 worth of bitcoin donations in its first week, a tremendous feat for any entity.
Coinbase revealed the astonishing fundraising highlight in a new blog post and noted that the partnership between the peer-to-peer decentralized virtual currency and the open-source website will continue to be an important collaboration moving forward.
As previously noted, the 237 bitcoins Wikipedia has received so far will be converted into United States dollars to avoid fluctuations in value. Also, Coinbase has confirmed that it will be eliminating all processing fees for non-profit organizations it works with. This is a win-win for Wikipedia.
“We were particularly excited to enable the Wikimedia Foundation to accept bitcoin donations because we feel that the decentralized, inclusive nature of Wikipedia is well aligned with bitcoin and we wanted to help the bitcoin community contribute to the democratization of information,” Coinbase wrote in the blog post.
The Wikimedia Foundation has yet to publicly comment on the tremendous accomplishment. The group had been discussing the possibility of incorporating bitcoin into its fundraising model for months now. Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, experimented with the digital currency earlier this year.
“I’m planning to re-open the conversation with the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Directors at our next meeting (and before, by email) about whether Wikimedia should accept Bitcoin,” he wrote in a Reddit thread back in March.
Coinbase averred last week that Wikipedia is the largest non-profit organization in the world to be using the cryptocurrency – it came soon after Dell became the largest company in the world adopt bitcoin.
More merchants, websites and philanthropic endeavors may continue to look into bitcoin as it offers tax advantages, low-cost transactions and competition from bitcoin payment processors, like Coinbase and BitPay – the ladder announced last month that it is dropping fees for all merchants as long they don’t seek out extra support and inquire about enterprise features.
Bitcoin is still currently trading at just under $600 (at the time of this writing).
