Anyone can put a wallet address on a web page and call themselves a charity. The barrier is a domain name and an afternoon.
That is not a reason to avoid giving in crypto. It is a reason to spend five minutes checking, using a method that does not require you to understand blockchains. Here is the one we use on other organisations — and, at the end, on ourselves.
Check 1: Is there a legal entity, with a country?
Open the About page. You are looking for three things: a legal name, a country, and a registration status.
"We are a registered charity" with no number and no jurisdiction is not a claim, it is a mood. A real organisation can tell you which registry it is in, or can tell you plainly that registration is not finished yet.
The honest version — "we are registered as X in Y, number Z" or "our registration is in progress and donations are not yet tax-deductible" — is a better signal than vague warmth, because it is checkable and because an organisation willing to say the unflattering version is less likely to be inventing the flattering one.
Red flag: no entity name, no country, no named people anywhere on the site.
Check 2: Who is accountable, by name?
At least one real person, with a role.
This is the check that most obviously separates projects from pages. An organisation asking strangers for money and unwilling to say who is responsible for it is telling you something. You do not need a full board list; you need one name you could look up.
Red flag: an entirely anonymous team, combined with an urgent appeal.
Check 3: Does the coin list belong to them, or to a processor?
Find the donate page and look for either a wallet address or a processor's name.
Both are legitimate. A charity publishing its own addresses receives the coin itself. A charity using a processor hands you to a company that converts it. The thing to notice is when neither is visible — when "we accept over 100 cryptocurrencies" appears with no indication of who is actually receiving them.
A list of 100+ coins is almost always a processor's inventory rather than a decision the charity made. We went through the consequences of that in which charities accept crypto.
Red flag: a long coin list, no processor named, no addresses shown, and no way to tell where the money lands.
Check 4: Is anything dated?
Look for a date on the donation page, the coin list, or any impact claim.
Undated pages are the single most reliable sign of abandonment. A crypto donation page with no timestamp may be describing an arrangement that ended years ago — we have found several, including coin lists that no longer match what the processor supports.
Red flag: impact figures with no date and no source, especially round numbers.
Check 5: If they claim a public ledger, open it
This is the check almost nobody performs, and it is the one that finds the broken claims.
Do not stop at the ledger page. Click through to the block explorer. Confirm that a transaction with that ID actually exists, that the amount matches, and that it went where the page says.
A ledger is easy to publish and hard to keep working. During earlier research we found a major organisation's transparency dashboard failing with an expired certificate — the claim had outlived its infrastructure. That is not malice, it is entropy, and it is why the click-through matters.
Red flag: a ledger that cannot be clicked into, or transaction IDs that do not resolve.
Now run all five on us
An article like this is worthless if it exempts its author. So:
1. Legal entity and country — pass, with a caveat we would rather state. Our About page names TraceGood, Estonia, and says plainly that we are not registered yet: our registration as a non-profit association is in progress and donations are not tax-deductible in any country. That is the unflattering version and it is the true one.
2. A named person — pass. Jason McGrey, founder, named on the About page.
3. Coin list ownership — pass. We use a payment processor, we say so on our own pages, and we do not imply we hold the coins ourselves.
4. Dates — pass, and we will keep having to earn it. Our research articles carry the date we checked each organisation. This one says 2026. Dates rot; if you find a claim here that has gone stale, that is a fault worth reporting.
5. The public ledger — we currently fail this.
Our ledger is live and wired to real data, but at the time of writing it still displays sample entries, because no donation has yet completed through the site. The entries are labelled as examples. They are still examples.
By the standard this article sets, that is a fail. A ledger showing illustrative rows is exactly what we would tell you to be suspicious of elsewhere, and we are not going to grade ourselves on a curve for it. When a real donation settles, the samples come down and the first genuine transaction appears with its block-explorer link. Until then, check 5 on us returns the answer it should.
The point of all this
None of these checks require trusting anyone, including us. They require opening pages and clicking links.
The reason we publish the method rather than just the reassurance is that the method outlives us. If TraceGood goes quiet in three years and this page stops being updated, you will still be able to run five checks on us and find out.
If you run them and something does not hold up, tell us. We have published corrections to our own earlier articles when we got something wrong about another organisation, and we would rather do the same about ourselves than let a claim sit.