Trust Center / Where the money goes
Where the money goes
updated 2026-09-02
The pledge, in its only wording
100% of net proceeds after published, capped, audited operating costs.
That is the single form the pledge is stated in — on this site, in the statutes, and everywhere else. Three qualifiers, always together: net (after the fee stack below), published and capped (the cap is a statutory constant that may only ever be lowered), and audited (accounts are audited by an independent auditor and published). The pledge is structural: the statutes forbid any distributable private profit, and they cannot be reopened to permit one.
The fee stack, with the cap
Every deduction between what a payer pays and what a category fund receives, stated by us before anyone computes it for us. The component table below is the same one the fee schedule shows; every percentage in it is illustrative until the first real transaction settles, at which point the measured figure travels with the ledger row.
| Deduction | Who takes it | Bound |
|---|---|---|
| Merchant-of-record fee | The payment provider acting as seller of record — card fees, invoicing, indirect tax | Contractual; published as a percentage (illustrative until measured) |
| Charity-intermediary fee | The established intermediary that vets, pools, and disburses to the seven category funds | Contractual; published as a range (illustrative until measured) |
| Operating levy | The Association’s own operating costs | Capped — a percentage fixed in the statutes’ annex on counsel’s advice before the first Entitlement is sold; may only be lowered; audited |
| Currency drag | Banks, on cross-border settlement | Measured per transaction and reported with the ledger row |
The single end-to-end flow-through figure — “of what a payer pays, this much reaches a fund” — publishes on the day the cap is fixed. Until then the components are published individually and the total is a range, because a total we cannot stand behind is worse than none.
Cost-line categories
The operating levy is spent only on the categories below, and the annual transparency report shows the spend per category against the cap. Nothing outside this list is a deductible operating cost; a new category is a statutes amendment, published with a diff.
- Hosting and edge services — the static site, the edge API, DNS, bot protection.
- Signing-key custody — the HSM-backed key vault and its audit logging.
- Transactional email and monitoring — delivery of receipts and notices; the status page.
- Audit and accounting — the independent auditor; bookkeeping; the annual accounts.
- Legal and compliance — counsel, the commercial register, VAT registration and filing, sanctions screening of payers and recipients.
- Insurance — errors-and-omissions cover, if and when counsel advises it.
- Contracted administration — paid, invoiced work on the registry and the ledger. The Association has no employees at founding; any future staff cost falls inside the cap, and no board member is remunerated for board service.
Methodology
- M+1 hold. A month’s proceeds are held one full month before allocation, so chargebacks and refunds resolve against the month they belong to rather than against a later one.
- Roll-forward balance. Anything not yet allocated is carried forward visibly, as its own line, rather than netted out of sight.
- Append-only ledger. Monthly exports are immutable once written. Corrections are new rows; annotations render as annotations, never as edits.
- Hash chain. Each monthly export links to the previous one, so a silently rewritten history is detectable by anyone who kept an old copy.
- Quarterly disbursement. Allocated funds move to the category funds once a quarter, through the intermediary, with the intermediary’s receipt referenced from the ledger.
The routing-tier report
Once a quarter, alongside the disbursement, the ledger carries a routing-tier report: how the quarter’s allocated proceeds split across the seven category funds, and on what basis.
| Tier | Basis at v0 | Where it is decided |
|---|---|---|
| Project defaults | The category defaults a project declares in its optional manifest, or the published fallback split when it declares none | PURPOSE.yml reference |
| Contributor designation | Shadow mode: contributors’ category votes are recorded and displayed, and route real money only after one reviewed quarter of shadow data and a fairness-qualified allocation algorithm | Contributors · Algorithms |
| Payer categories | The categories a payer selects for its certificate are printed on the certificate; they do not by themselves redirect funds | Companies |
| Steward discretion | Only for shares nobody has designated, and only among the seven published categories | Statutes, Art. 7 |
The seven category funds: health, education, poverty relief, humanitarian aid, environment, animal welfare, research. Free-text recipients do not exist in the design; every recipient is screened, contracted, and named in the ledger at disbursement.
The ledger
The public allocation ledger lives at /transparency: the methodology above, the roll-forward balance, and one page per month regenerated from the immutable monthly export. Its first row appears after the first settled Entitlement purchase and the one-month hold; the first disbursement follows the first full quarter.
What is true today
No money has moved. There is no ledger row, no disbursement, and therefore no impact figure anywhere on this site. Entitlement sales open with the founding cohort; until the first settled purchase clears its hold, the counters on the home page stay on mechanism copy, and every currency figure on this site is labelled illustrative.
Illustrative — no transaction has settled yet
The fee stack
Every deduction between what a payer pays and what a public-benefit fund receives. Percentages are illustrative until the first real transaction settles, at which point they are replaced by measured figures carried with the ledger row.
Illustrative fee stack — Schedule v1
| Deduction | Illustrative share | Who takes it |
|---|---|---|
| Merchant of record | ~5% + a fixed USD 0.50 (illustrative) | Payment provider acting as seller of record, including card fees and tax handling |
| Charity intermediary | 1–5% (illustrative) | The established intermediary that vets and disburses to cause funds |
| Operating levy | cap not yet set | Capped in the statutes, published, audited. The cap percentage is set with counsel before launch; no decided number is printed here until it is. |
| Currency drag | measured per transaction | Currency conversion drag on cross-border settlement, measured per transaction and reported with the ledger row rather than estimated once. |
End to end, on one illustrative fee
The same stack applied to a single fee from the published table, so the total is ours to state rather than someone else's to compute. Every figure in this walk is illustrative: the levy line uses a placeholder rate, and nothing here has been charged to anyone.
Illustrative end-to-end walk — $10M–100M band, Project lane, Schedule v1
| Step | Amount | Of the fee | What it is |
|---|---|---|---|
| Purpose Fee paid | USD 400.00 | 100% | $10M–100M band, Project lane, annual |
| Merchant of record (~5% + USD 0.50) | − USD 20.50 | 5.13% | Payment provider acting as seller of record: card fees, tax determination, remittance, refunds |
| Operating levy (10% placeholder — not a decision) | − USD 37.95 | 9.49% | Capped in the statutes, published, audited. The cap is set with counsel before launch; this line uses the sample placeholder rate so the arithmetic is complete |
| Charity intermediary (3% midpoint) | − USD 10.25 | 2.56% | The established intermediary that vets recipients and disburses to the category funds |
| Currency drag (~0.5%) | − USD 1.66 | 0.42% | Conversion on cross-border settlement. Measured per transaction and reported with the ledger row, never estimated once and reused |
| Reaches a category fund | USD 329.64 | 82.41% | What a published category fund receives, before the fund’s own programme costs |
About 82.41% of an illustrative $10M–100M-band Project fee reaches a category fund. That figure moves when the levy cap is set and when real settlement rates are measured, and it will move in public: the components above are published individually so a reader can recompute the total instead of trusting it.
The pledge, in its only wording: 100% of net proceeds after published, capped operating costs (cap: set with counsel before launch, audited).
The single end-to-end flow-through figure is published here as soon as the ops-cost cap is set with counsel and written into the statutes. Until then the components above are published individually and the total is stated as a range, not as a number we cannot yet stand behind.