Give to Charity with USDC on Base
Keep the USDC. Give the interest. Every gift on-chain.
If you hold USDC, the usual way to give with it is to send some to a charity and let it go. That's a fine thing to do. Charity Billionaire offers a different option: deposit your USDC, keep it, and let the interest it would have earned go to charity — every week, for as long as you stay in.
How it works
- You deposit USDC on the Base network into an open, non-custodial smart contract. The deposit is recorded as yours and you can withdraw it in full at any time.
- The contract supplies the pool to Aave v3, where it earns interest. Your principal is never part of what gets paid out.
- Every Thursday at 9 PM Eastern, the week's interest is split 90% to one depositor chosen at random, 5% to that week's charity, and 5% to the platform.
- Each whole dollar you deposit is one equal entry in the draw while it stays deposited.
How the gift reaches the charity
When the draw runs, the contract pays the winner and hands the 5% charity share to a Charity Forwarder contract in the same transaction. Moments later the forwarder donates it, in its own transaction, through Endaoment — a 501(c)(3) donor-advised fund — which grants it to that week's named charity. Splitting it into two steps means a problem on the donation side can never stop a winner from being paid.
Both steps are public events on Base. The Transparency page lists every contract address with verified source code, and the record of drawings follows each gift through to the charity that received it.
The charities
The beneficiary rotates every week through a curated roster of established nonprofits. The current roster:
- Direct Relief — medical and disaster relief
- Feeding America — hunger relief
- World Central Kitchen — disaster food relief
- St. Jude (ALSAC) — childhood cancer
- Against Malaria Foundation — global health
- GiveDirectly — direct cash transfers
- charity: water — clean water
- Doctors Without Borders — medical humanitarian aid
- Habitat for Humanity — affordable housing
- The Nature Conservancy — environment
This week's and next week's charity are shown on the home page and published on-chain before each draw.
Getting USDC onto Base
Deposits use USDC on Base only. USDC on Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, or sitting in an exchange account is a separate balance and has to be moved to Base first — for example by withdrawing from Coinbase and choosing Base as the network. If you deposit from your own wallet (MetaMask, the Base app, Rainbow, Trust Wallet and others), you'll also need a little ETH on Base to pay the network fee. The FAQ has step-by-step instructions for desktop and phone.
No USDC yet? You don't need any. Tap “Enter with card” on the home page: a passkey on your phone becomes your wallet, you buy USDC with a debit card (purchases start at $5), and the network fee is covered for you.
Never send USDC directly to the contract address. A plain transfer is not a deposit — it records no balance and no entry, and because the contract is non-custodial, no one, including us, can recover it. Always deposit through the Make a Deposit button on the site.
Nothing here is financial, legal, or tax advice, and nothing here is an offer of a security. This is a prize draw funded by the pool's interest; your deposit is not spent and is withdrawable at any time. Non-custodial and not insured — smart-contract risk applies. Prizes may be taxable — see Taxes.