Swedish Bitcoin exchange Safello has launched a new service that lets charities set up Bitcoin donation campaigns quickly and for free.

We have seen charities succeed with Bitcoin campaigns in the past, but what makes Safello’s donations platform so interesting is that it visualizes the donations in real time, thanks to the blockchain’s being publicly verifiable.

Safello CEO Frank Schuil told Forbes over the weekend that as Bitcoin already forces a certain level of financial transparency, the company felt it would do well to embrace that.

“It’s an incredible thing to watch real-time incoming donations from people all around the world uniting to complete a funding goal to support these causes,” Schuil said in the piece.

- Frank Schuil, CEO of Safello 

All of the donated bitcoins go directly to the charities that get their own fundraising landing pages on Safello’s website. There are three up at the time of writing:

  • LiveBuild, which is raising 25 BTC for a school in Cameroon;
  • Shifo’s Every Child Counts campaign, which is raising 20 BTC for vaccines in Uganda’s Busoga region; and
  • The Lifeboat Foundation, which issues bounties to help fix bugs in the Bitcoin protocol.

Schuil sees this kind of fundraising as an important model for the future. Schuil told Forbes:

“Another great possibility through Bitcoin donations is it more easily allows for truly global campaigns because there are no geographical restrictions and the low cost of Bitcoins enable the possibility of micro funding goals. In the long term I foresee new charities emerge that solely raise and spend Bitcoins where donators can follow the money trail back to the cause.”

Charities interested in working with Safello to raise bitcoins should go here to get in touch with the company.

Safello, which launched in Stockholm 13 months ago, has been busy rolling out new services. The company brought Sweden its first Bitcoin ATM in December, added a faster user identification service in the spring, and partnered with a Swedish transfer service that works with most of the country’s banks so that Safello users can buy bitcoins quickly on their phones.

Also, anyone interested in the remittances market should have a look at Safello summer intern Daniel Leppert’s post on the company blog in July.

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