Ethereum is the easiest major cryptocurrency to donate and the easiest to lose on the way. Those two facts have the same cause: ETH exists on a mainnet and on a growing number of cheaper networks that look identical in your wallet, and a charity's published address almost always works on only one of them.
Nobody writing about charitable ETH giving seems to mention this. It is the single most expensive thing a donor can get wrong.
Every organisation below was checked on 22 October 2026 by loading that organisation's own page. Not a directory, not a press release, not another article.
Coin lists change without warning. This is a snapshot with a date on it.
The short answer
| Organisation | What they accept alongside ETH | How they receive it |
|---|---|---|
| The Tor Project | BTC, DOGE, LTC, XMR, XLM, ZEC | Self-hosted BTCPay, own addresses |
| Qubes OS | BTC, XMR, and ERC-20 stablecoins | Own address, signature-verifiable |
| GrapheneOS Foundation | BTC, XMR, ZEC, ADA, LTC | Own published addresses |
| Riseup | BTC, XMR, ZEC, BCH | Own published addresses |
| Freedom of the Press Foundation | BTC, LTC, XMR, XLM, ZEC | Not stated on their donate page |
| Amnesty International | 100+ coins and tokens | The Giving Block and Gemini (custodial) |
Six organisations, five of them holding their own keys. That is a far better showing than Zcash, where we found five, or Monero, where custodians have largely withdrawn.
The pattern is the same one we keep finding: software, privacy and press-freedom organisations run their own wallets, while large humanitarian charities reach crypto through a processor.
The thing to understand before you send ETH
An Ethereum address is 42 characters beginning 0x, and the same string is valid on Ethereum mainnet, on Arbitrum, on Optimism, on Base, on Polygon, on BNB Smart Chain and on dozens of others. Your wallet will happily send to it on any of them. The funds will arrive at that address on whichever network you chose — and if nobody controls that address on that network, or the recipient cannot sign there, the donation is gone.
Qubes OS states this on its own donation page more plainly than most processors do. Its Ethereum address is a Gnosis Safe on mainnet only, it accepts ETH and fully ERC-20-compliant tokens such as USDT, USDC and DAI, and the page warns, in a red box, that assets sent on a Layer 2 such as Arbitrum or Optimism, or a sidechain such as Polygon, may be lost.
That warning is correct and it generalises. A multi-signature wallet or a smart-contract wallet is deployed to one network at a time. The address existing elsewhere does not mean anyone can open it there.
So before you give:
- Find the network, not just the address. If a page says only "Ethereum", assume mainnet.
- Match it in your wallet's network selector before you paste anything.
- Send a small amount first if the gift is large and the page is ambiguous.
- Do not assume a cheaper network is a favour. Saving three dollars of gas and losing the whole gift is not a saving.
We wrote separately about what happens when crypto goes to the wrong address. The wrong network is the more common and less reversible version of that mistake.
Tokens are not the same gift as ether
Two of the organisations above draw a distinction worth respecting.
GrapheneOS states on its donate page that it is not looking for donations of tokens, only Ethereum itself. Qubes, by contrast, explicitly welcomes ERC-20 stablecoins at the same address.
This is not pedantry on their part. A charity that receives an unexpected token has to price it, account for it, find a venue that will sell it, and in many jurisdictions explain it — for an asset that may be worth very little. Sending a long-tail token to an address that asked for ether creates work, not value.
If the page names the assets it wants, send one of those.
Why ETH is accepted more widely than almost anything else
Ethereum sits in both supply chains at once, which no privacy coin manages.
Self-custodying organisations can hold it with ordinary, well-audited tooling — including multi-signature and smart-contract wallets that let several people share control of a charity's funds without any one of them being able to spend it. Qubes runs its Bitcoin fund as a multi-signature wallet for exactly that reason, and its Ethereum address is a Gnosis Safe.
Custodial donation processors also list it, because exchanges list it, because regulators broadly treat it as a commodity-like asset rather than a privacy tool. So the humanitarian charity using a processor and the privacy project running its own node both end up accepting the same coin by completely different routes.
That is the opposite of what happened to Monero, and it is most of why these two lists look so different.
An honest note about verification
Qubes does something here that we have not seen another organisation do, and it deserves naming: it publishes its donation addresses inside a cryptographically signed release — the Qubes Security Pack — and documents how to check the signatures. That means a donor can verify the address was published by the project itself, rather than trusting that the web page in front of them has not been tampered with.
Almost every other charity, including this one, asks you to trust the page. That is worth knowing about the state of the practice.
How to check any of this yourself
- Open the organisation's own domain. Not a directory, not a search summary, not this page.
- Find the coin list. If there isn't one, you are looking at a processor's dropdown.
- Look for the network. "Ethereum" on its own means mainnet; anything else should be stated.
- Look for a date. An undated crypto page is often years stale.
- If they claim a public ledger, open it and click through to a block explorer to confirm a transaction exists.
Where we stand
TraceGood accepts Ethereum, alongside more than thirty other coins and networks. We should declare the obvious conflict of interest: we take ETH through a payment processor rather than our own node, so we are describing a trade-off we have made ourselves, in the direction that costs us control.
Every confirmed donation appears on our public ledger with a link to the transaction on an independent block explorer.
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.
If something here is wrong, or a page has changed since we checked, tell us and we will correct it.