NGO-Chain: A Decentralized Platform for Transparent Donations and Milestone-Based Fund Release)

Abstract

Traditional philanthropic organizations often suffer from lim ited transparency, where donors have minimal visibility into how their contributions are utilized after donation [1,14]. To addressthisissue, this paper presents NGO-Chain, a hybrid Web3 platform designed to im prove accountability and transparency in charitable fund management. The proposed system utilizes a milestone-based conditional escrow mech anism in which donated funds are locked within blockchain smart con tracts and released incrementally only after administrative verification of uploaded proof documents stored on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) [4,5]. The architecture combines React-based frontend interfaces, Spring Boot middleware, decentralized IPFS storage, and Ethereum/Polygon smart contracts to create a scalable hybrid infrastructure capable of supporting real-time public transaction monitoring [14,12]. In addition, the platform integrates donor reputation tracking and blockchain-backed transaction auditing to strengthen trust between donors and NGOs [6,7]. By com bining decentralized financial management with milestone verification workflows, NGO-Chain provides a secure and transparent framework for milestone-driven charitable donations while reducing dependency on cen tralized trust mechanisms.