- Wikipedia will not accept donations in cryptocurrencies.
- Wikipedia’s parent company WMF cited the ecological impact of Bitcoin as one of the reasons for halting crypto donations.
Popular and free encyclopedia website, Wikipedia will cease to acknowledge cryptocurrency donations after accepting them for the past 8 years.
In the latest update issued by Wikipedia’s parent company, Wikimedia Foundation (WMF), the foundation has stated that it will discontinue its process of accepting payments in Ethereum and Bitcoin after 400 WMF community members weighed their opinions concerning the relevance of cryptocurrencies in general.
Wikipedia Is Shutting Its Bitpay Account To Avoid Future Crypto Donations
The news of Wikipedia halting its crypto donations came shortly after the foundation had conducted a poll, where 70% of respondents were in favor of ceasing crypto donating citing the ecological impact of Bitcoin as one of their primary arguments.
The WMF community members had previously urged Wikipedia to stop accepting payments in cryptocurrencies citing the negative ecological impact of cryptocurrencies. The poll results indicated a majority of the members, nearly 232 were in favor of the proposal that asserted discontinuing crypto donations for good, noting its unsustainable nature as one of many reasons for halting crypto donations.
“The Wikimedia Foundation has decided to discontinue direct acceptance of cryptocurrency as a means of donating. We began our direct acceptance of cryptocurrency in 2014 based on requests from our volunteers and donor communities. We are making this decision based on recent feedback from those same communities. Specifically, we will be closing our Bitpay account, which will remove our ability to directly accept cryptocurrency as a method of donating.” WMF said in an update
In addition to this, the foundation further stated that it had received nearly $130,100.94 worth of crypto donations in 2021, which amounted to roughly 0.8% of the total contributions received by the organization. The decision of Wikipedia to discontinue crypto donations has come after a three-month-long discussion with nearly 400 WMF community members who are ready to support a crypto-free approach when it comes to making donations to Wikipedia.
Wikimedia Foundation had first started accepting cryptocurrency donations back in 2014 when the WMF was open to accepting Bitcoin donations, citing it as a “simple and inclusive” method of contributing to the foundation at large. The foundation had earlier collaborated with Coinbase to facilitate Bitcoin donations and had later shifted to BitPay to add more crypto to its growing portfolio.