Stellar should be one of the best ways to give a small amount to charity. Transactions settle in seconds, fees are fractions of a cent, and it was built for moving money rather than running applications. On paper it solves the problem that makes a five-dollar Bitcoin donation faintly ridiculous.
In practice, very few charities take it directly. We went looking, and the list is shorter than for coins with far worse economics.
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 | Also accepts | How they receive it |
|---|---|---|
| The Tor Project | BTC, DOGE, ETH, LTC, XMR, ZEC | Self-hosted BTCPay, own addresses |
| Freedom of the Press Foundation | BTC, ETH, LTC, XMR, ZEC | Not stated on their donate page |
Two organisations — out of every self-custodying charity we have surveyed across this series. Compare Ethereum, where we found six, or Zcash, where we found five.
Both of these are privacy and press-freedom organisations that accept a broad spread of coins. Neither appears to accept Stellar because of anything specific to Stellar; they accept most things.
The honest gap in this list
There is a second route, and we cannot report it precisely.
Large charities that advertise "100+ cryptocurrencies" reach them through a custodial donation processor. Those processors generally do support XLM, so a charity using one probably accepts Stellar whether or not it ever says the word. Amnesty International, for instance, states on its own page that it accepts Bitcoin, Ethereum and over 100 additional cryptocurrencies through its website, processed by The Giving Block and Gemini.
We are not going to turn that into a list of named charities, because we would be inferring each one from a processor's capability rather than reading it on the charity's own page. That is precisely the inference that produces wrong claims, and we have published one before.
So: if you want to give XLM to a specific large charity, check its own donate page for the coin selector rather than trusting any list, including this one.
The failure that actually loses Stellar donations
More important than the list. Stellar uses a memo field, and it is the single biggest cause of lost XLM.
An exchange holding Stellar for millions of customers does not open millions of Stellar accounts. It keeps a few addresses and tells customers apart by a memo attached to each payment. The address identifies the building; the memo identifies the apartment.
Send XLM to a custodial address with no memo, and the payment is valid, final, recorded on-chain — and credited to nobody. The money arrived. The software that assigns it to an account does not know whose it is.
- Sending to a charity's own self-custodied address? Usually no memo needed. Tor and FPF publish their own addresses.
- Sending to an exchange, processor or custodial deposit address? Almost certainly required.
- Sending with the wrong memo? Worse than none, because it may be credited to somebody else.
Copy exactly what the recipient's page shows. If it shows no memo, do not invent one. We wrote this up in full in memos and destination tags.
One other Stellar quirk worth knowing: an account must hold a small minimum balance in XLM to exist at all. You cannot donate your entire balance to zero, and a brand-new account cannot receive a gift smaller than that minimum.
Why the list is so short
The interesting question is not who accepts XLM but why so few bother, when the fees are so obviously suited to charity.
Our read, from the pattern across this series rather than from anybody's stated reasons:
Self-custodying organisations accept coins their own communities hold. Tor, Riseup, GrapheneOS and Qubes accept Bitcoin, Monero and Ethereum because privacy-minded technical donors hold those. Stellar's holders are not especially concentrated in that community, so there is less pressure to add it.
Custodial processors made the question invisible. A charity that signed up for "100+ coins" never decided to accept Stellar. It is in a dropdown. Nobody wrote a page about it, so nothing is searchable, so it looks as though nobody accepts it.
Running a Stellar node or wallet is a separate chunk of work for an organisation that already has Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets, and the marginal donation volume is small. The economics are good for the donor and unexciting for the charity.
The result is a coin that is excellent for small gifts and barely marketed for them.
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 a memo field in whatever the page gives you, and copy it exactly.
- 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.
A note on what we could not check
While researching this we found widely repeated claims about Stellar being used by a United Nations agency to deliver cash assistance. The claims may well be accurate, and the agency's site returned an access error to us on the day we checked, so we could not read the primary source.
We are therefore not stating it as fact. We mention it because leaving out the reason would be its own kind of dishonesty, and because the failure mode of this whole genre is a claim repeated by people who could not check it.
Where we stand
TraceGood accepts Stellar, alongside more than thirty other coins and networks, and we take it through a payment processor rather than our own node — a trade-off that costs us custody and is worth stating when we are praising organisations that hold their own keys.
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.