Proof of giving

Abstract

Charity is the quintessential driving force of humanity. Charitable work, when done right, has the capacity to eradicate poverty, construct basic infrastructure for all and many more. How- ever, in the wrong hands, it can be more of a driving force of evil than good. Currently, there is a lack of openness and transparency, hindering people from understanding where their dona- tions are going and if they are truly creating a change for the better. Donors are often unaware of how their contributions are being utilised, leading to a significant trust deficit, which, over time, results in a decline in donor support and retention. Hence, these factors highlight the need for Web3-based blockchain technology intervention to restore donor trust. Even though the advent of the digital age has paved the way for many Web2 centralised online donation platforms, these upgrades often bring minimal improvements rather than fundamental shifts. Although existing Web2 technologies attempt to portray a transparent donation system by showing proof of transactions or receipts, we can never truly know if these are legitimate, as a single centralised organisation controls them. This unreliable mechanism pushes donors to trust a central intermediary, the charitable organisation itself, to report on the management of funds. Blockchain technology addresses this problem by storing immutable transaction data visible to anyone on the network, ensuring trust through cryptographic proof rather than reliance on a central authority. This trust-guaranteed technology lays the foundation for the solution using Web3 architecture. This project aims to build a decentralised Web3 platform for charity organisations and donors. The main goal is to create a transparent and secure ecosystem where donors can track fund usage at any time. A user-facing application allows donors to securely make donations via Stripe, while a unique Non-Fungible Token (NFT) is minted for each donation to serve as a digital receipt on the blockchain. Smart contracts handle milestone-based fund allocation and release. The platform also incorporates AI-powered proof verification using the Claude Vision API. When charities submit evidence documents for milestone completion, the AI analyses submis- sions for document authenticity, relevance to the stated milestone, and potential fraud indica- tors. This serves as a decision-support tool for human approvers rather than an autonomous judge. A Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipeline further enriches the verification process by retrieving historical project context and similar past proofs from a vector database, enabling more consistent and informed assessments across submissions. Donors can also verify where their donations are being used and whether the funds are being spent in relevance to the charity project that they have donated to. The technical implementation of the application is the primary focus of this project, and legal or regulatory frameworks related to monetary policies will not be addressed. The impact of this project lies in its ability to redefine accountability in the donation sector, through which donors will have complete visibility on where their donations flow.