Wikimedia Foundation Has Suspended Crypto Donation on its Platforms

The Wikimedia Foundation has announced that it is going to suspend cryptocurrency donations across its wide range of platforms.

The move became necessary based on requests from its community of donors as detailed in an announcement shared by the Foundation. 

The Wikimedia Foundation is an umbrella body for a group of platforms that adhere to the Wiki style of websites which permits editing from various internet users. Some of the branches within the company’s body include Wikipedia, Wikibooks, Wikiversity, and Wikinews respectively. 

The Wikimedia Foundation started accepting digital currencies for its donations back in 2014 at the behest of its community, and it said the decision to halt these forms of donation is based on months of discussion by the same community over the suitability of digital assets as donation assets for the platform.

“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,” the announcement from the foundation reads.

As revealed, the implication of the move, according to the Wikimedia Foundation, is that it will be closing down its Bitpay account, a move that will take away its ability to directly accept cryptocurrency as a method of donating.

A number of critics have continued to talk down the environmental friendliness of digital currencies due to the high energy utilization and carbon footprint of Bitcoin (BTC) and other Proof of Work (PoW) cryptocurrencies. The Wikimedia Foundation’s move to ban crypto donations was preceded by a related move from Mozilla, the tech firm in charge of the Firefox browser. 

Mozilla Corporation also backtracked on its acceptance of cryptocurrencies due to the environmental impact of the nascent asset class. The only difference between the Mozilla and Wikimedia Foundation’s decisions is that the latter is open to further evolution in the crypto industry in the near future.