Try to donate two dollars in cryptocurrency and you will often be told you cannot. The reason is rarely explained, which makes it look arbitrary. It is not.
There are three separate floors underneath any crypto donation, and they move independently.
The three floors
The network fee. Every transaction pays the chain to include it. On Solana or Stellar that is a fraction of a cent. On Ethereum during congestion it can be several dollars. A donation smaller than its own fee is not a donation, it is a transfer of money to validators.
The dust limit. Most chains refuse outputs below a tiny threshold, to stop the ledger filling with amounts too small to ever be worth spending. This floor is usually trivial, but it exists.
The processor minimum. This is the one that actually bites. A payment processor converting coins to fiat has its own costs — exchange fees, spread, the overhead of a conversion that may not be worth executing. It sets a floor per coin, and that floor is often well above the network fee.
Those three stack. The number you see at checkout is whichever is highest.
What this looks like in practice
These are the real minimums on our own checkout, read from our live coin data on 1 October 2026. They move, sometimes weekly, so treat them as a shape rather than a table to memorise — our accepted coins page always shows the current figure.
The cheapest coins to give in were Stellar and XRP at about $0.48, Polygon at $0.49, and Ethereum and USDC on Base at about $0.50. Sui, Toncoin and Litecoin all sat around $0.51 to $0.53.
The median across all 34 coins we accept was about $0.79. So for most of them, a one-dollar gift is genuinely possible.
The expensive end is where it gets interesting. Zcash was $16.80. USDT on Tron was $11.37. Monero was $6.33.
Why the expensive ones are expensive
Those three figures are worth sitting with, because none of them is explained by network fees.
Tron is famously cheap to transact on, and yet USDT on Tron carried one of the highest floors on our list. Monero and Zcash are not congested chains either. What these have in common is that they are harder for a processor to handle — thinner liquidity, more conversion friction, in Monero's case a privacy design that complicates the whole custodial pipeline, and in all three cases exchange support that is narrower than the coin's popularity suggests.
So the minimum is not really measuring the chain. It is measuring how awkward the coin is for the financial plumbing behind the donation. That is a genuinely useful thing to know, and it is invisible unless someone publishes the numbers.
It also means the usual advice — "use a cheap chain for small gifts" — is right for the wrong reason. The chain being cheap matters less than the coin being easy to convert.
How small can you actually go?
If you want to give a small amount in crypto and have it mostly arrive:
- Under $5, use Stellar, XRP, Polygon, Base or Solana. The floors are around fifty cents and the fees are negligible.
- $5 to $25, almost anything on our list works, with the privacy coins and Tron-based USDT as the exceptions.
- Giving in Monero or Zcash, expect a floor in the $6 to $17 range. That is not us discouraging privacy coins — we accept both deliberately — it is the cost of the route.
We went through the wider comparison in the best cryptocurrencies for small donations.
A word on why we publish this at all
Most charities accepting crypto cannot tell you their per-coin minimums, because the minimums belong to a processor they do not query and a dropdown they did not write. The number appears at checkout and nobody at the organisation could tell you why.
We monitor ours weekly, because a coin whose minimum has quietly climbed to $17 is a coin we are effectively no longer offering to small donors, and we would rather know. The same monitoring is what tells us when a coin stops being payable at all.
That is the same instinct behind our public ledger: publish the number, let people check it, and find out when it is wrong.
Before you give a small amount
- Check the minimum on the page, not from an article — including this one.
- Check the network as well as the coin. USDC on Base and USDC on Ethereum are different costs entirely.
- Send a test first if the amount matters to you. On a cheap chain this costs a cent.
- Remember the fee is yours, not the charity's. A $1 gift that costs you $0.02 to send arrives as $1.
Where we stand
TraceGood accepts 34 coins and networks. Every confirmed donation, however small, appears on our public ledger with a link to the transaction on an independent block explorer — a two-dollar gift is as checkable as a two-thousand-dollar one.
We are a newly founded organisation whose registration as a non-profit association in Estonia is not yet complete, and donations to us are not tax-deductible anywhere. Our About page carries the full position.