"Transparency" is the cheapest word in fundraising. A page with a chart on it, a pie showing 87% to programmes, and a stock photograph of a warehouse costs an afternoon and proves nothing.
A transparency page is only worth anything if it lets a stranger check a specific claim against a source the charity does not control. That is a test you can run in about five minutes, and most pages fail it.
Below is the test. Then we run it on our own page, and report what it finds, which is not entirely flattering.
The five-minute test
1. Find one specific, checkable claim. Not "we delivered aid to thousands". Something with a number, a date and an identifier: a transaction, a filing, an audit, a named recipient organisation.
2. Find the independent source. A blockchain explorer, a charity regulator's register, a published audit by a named firm. The test is whether the record lives somewhere the charity cannot edit.
3. Check it. Open the source yourself. Do not click the charity's own "verify" button — that is still the charity telling you.
4. Check what is not there. Totals without rows, rows without identifiers, percentages without a denominator, "audited" without an auditor's name, a ledger that starts suspiciously recently.
5. Check the dates. A quarterly report that stopped two years ago tells you more than its contents do.
What good and bad look like
Claims that can be checked:
- An on-chain transaction hash. Either it exists with that amount at that time, or it does not.
- A registration number at a national charity regulator, which you can look up.
- A named audit firm and a period.
- A named partner organisation, which you can contact to confirm the relationship.
Claims that cannot be checked, however sincerely meant:
- An overhead percentage with no accounts behind it.
- "100% of your donation goes to the cause", a claim that is almost never true in the sense a reader assumes.
- Beneficiary numbers with no methodology.
- A ledger of donations with amounts but no transaction identifiers.
The last one is the most common trick in crypto fundraising. A table of donations is just a table. Without a hash it is typing.
Now run it on us
It would be hypocritical to publish that test and not apply it, so here is our own transparency page, checked on 22 October 2026.
It currently shows two confirmed donations, both with transaction hashes and links to independent block explorers. We ran our own test on both.
The Cardano row passes completely. The page lists 4.281991 ADA on 20 October 2026. We looked the hash up through a public Cardano API with no connection to us: the transaction exists in block 14,093,638, its output is 4,281,991 lovelace — which is exactly 4.281991 ADA, to the last digit — and it was timestamped 16:22 UTC on 20 October 2026. Amount, date and existence all match what we claim. You can repeat that in a browser in under a minute.
The Monero row does not, and cannot. The page lists 1.48141706 XMR on 12 October 2026, valued at $800. The transaction genuinely exists — we confirmed it in block 3,782,091 with thousands of confirmations. But Monero hides amounts by design. An explorer will confirm that a transaction happened and will not tell you it was 1.48 XMR, because nobody outside the transaction can see that.
So the amount on that row rests on our word alone.
That is not a flaw in our record-keeping and it is not us being evasive. It is the privacy guarantee working exactly as intended, and we said the same thing about Zcash before it applied to us. But it means an honest description of our own ledger is: one row fully independently verifiable, one row verifiable only as to its existence.
A transparency page that does not tell you which of its rows are which is overstating itself. Now ours does.
The questions worth asking any charity
If a page does not answer these, ask directly. The quality of the answer is the information.
- "What is your legal status, and where?" An unregistered organisation is not automatically dishonest, but it should say so plainly. We are unregistered and say so.
- "Can I verify a donation you received, from a source you don't control?"
- "Where do the figures on this page come from?"
- "What happened to the money you received last quarter?"
- "Who receives my data when I donate?" Often an entirely different company in an entirely different country — we wrote about finding ours.
- "What can't you prove?" The most revealing question on the list. Everyone has an answer; few volunteer it.
What we cannot show you yet
Applying point four to ourselves: we have received donations and we have not yet published a spending report, because there is very little to report and we would rather publish nothing than pad it.
We will not be putting an impact figure on this page until there is a measured one. No beneficiary counts, no meals-delivered arithmetic derived from a dollar total. If a number is not measured, it does not go on the site.
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.
The short version
Transparency is not a design style. It is whether a stranger can check something.
Run the five-minute test on any charity you are considering, including us. If it fails, the failure is the answer. If the charity tells you in advance which parts of its own page cannot be checked, that is worth more than a chart.
If you spot something on our transparency page that does not add up, tell us and we will correct it publicly.
Our public ledger · How to verify a donation on the blockchain · How to check if a crypto charity is real