From DMs to Donations—How Tokenizing ‘Time’ Could Transform Charitable Giving

A stranger pays $50 to send you a direct message on Instagram. Another drops $200 for fifteen minutes of your undivided attention on a video call. In the creator economy, this isn’t exploitation—it’s just another Tuesday. But what happens when these intimate conversations and transactions become the unlikely engine of charitable giving?

One answer arrived last week with an announcement that speaks to how profoundly our relationship with both money and genuine human connection has transformed. When personal interactions become purchasable moments—and those moments help to fund philanthropic and social impact-driven organizations—we’re confronted with a fundamental, yet perhaps a more philosophical question: Can the most private aspects of human connection be monetized, even for charitable purposes? Or, could this be perceived as “negative” exploitation?

Time…as a “charitable asset?”

Earlier this month, a cryptocurrency donation platform called Donate.GG announced on X (fka Twitter) its first official partnership with Time.fun, a SocialFi platform built on Solana, enables creators to tokenize their “time” and create a market for it, as well as St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. For the uninitiated, social finance or “SocialFi,” conceptually, fuses elements of social media and financial together for the purposes of enabling users to interact and transact with creators, sometimes for profit.

Donate.GG founder “Leap,” also known to the X community as @leap_xyz, was inspired by his late father’s battle with cancer (March 23, 2025)—up and until the very last moments he spent with him, represents a warm, heartfelt social impact initiative that is already changing crypto’s narrative as we speak through a sincere, empathy-driven onchain crypto donation pr0tocol.

Proud to announce that we have officially partnered with @timedotfun to process their creators’ charitable contributions, starting with a staggering $352,000 donation to @StJude. This is the first step in creating the rails that connect crypto native apps and the nonprofit world. pic.twitter.com/5vNMryBDFF

— DONATE.GG (@donatedotgg) June 4, 2025

So @donatedotgg processed 360k USD in donations in its first week, not bad. I’ve never been the best poster so I kinda just want the product to speak for itself. I think over time we will become the default way people donate crypto to things they care about

— Leap (@leap_xyz) June 11, 2025

Tomorrow is the 1 year anniversary of the first donation drive I did for St. Jude and also my birthday. So I think it’s probably a good time to release this thing finally lol. Pretty nervous and I’m sure it’ll break on day 1 but we will figure it out if it does

— Leap (@leap_xyz) March 18, 2025

Woke up at 8am to the hospice nurse telling me today is probably the day my dad passes, so I’m going to push launch till next week and just take the next few days to focus on family. I know all I’ve posted about the last few months is this so I’m sorry if you’re tired of hearing…

— Leap (@leap_xyz) March 19, 2025

My dad passed with only he and I in the room. I’d just told him everything I wish I had always said, about how much I loved and appreciated him, and how all I wanted was to make him proud. I put my hand on his hand, and a few minutes later he was gone. I believe he heard what I…

— Leap (@leap_xyz) March 23, 2025

Currently in beta, the crypto-based donation platform is built on blockchain technology, and enables seamless donations of cryptocurrencies like Ether (ETH), Bitcoin (BTC), Solana (SOL), and a digital stablecoin pegged to the US Dollar (USDC) across Ethereum and Solana networks.

In partnering with the Solana-powered platform that creates a marketplace allowing creators to tokenize their time for exclusive experiences like DMs, calls, and auctions—transforms the very nature of what constitutes “charitable giving.” Whether that’s a mechanism for positive impact through legitimate means, or something else entirely, remains to be seen.

Kicking off the collaboration, Donate.GG will channel $352,000 USD in creator donations to St. Jude, representing a portion of the $440,000+ USD that Time.fun’s platform has reportedly generated for charitable causes in a time span of just three months.

What’s most intriguing about Donate.GG’s and Time.fun’s partnership, however, isn’t the $352,000 USD flowing to SCRH. It’s not even the blockchain technology making these transactions transparent and instant. The true disruption lies in something far more profound: the commoditization of time itself as a “charitable asset.”

A Charitable Awakening for the Creator Economy?

This partnership arrives at a critical inflection point. Overall charitable giving dropped 2.1 percent in 2023 after inflation, with individual giving falling 2.4 percent (approx. $374 billion USD) creating what many call a “giving recession.” Traditional fundraising models have struggled to engage younger donors who increasingly distrust institutional philanthropy and seek more direct, transparent ways to create impact.

In early February, The Giving Block, a crypto fundraising platform for nonprofits and donors, released its 2025 Annual Report on Crypto Philanthropy, revealing that 2024 was actually a significant milestone for crypto donations with over $1 billion USD in crypto donated to charitable causes in that it represented the largest year of crypto-based donations to date.

However, this significant milestone and achievement was unfortunately “[l]ost in the noise from the presidential election and the AI renaissance, cryptocurrencies boomed past previous all-time highs, fueling a breathtaking increase in charitable giving—especially in the final months of the year,” said Pat Duffy, the co-founder of The Giving Block. Mr. Duffy also believes that 2025 is an even greater growth opportunity for crypto investors, expressing his further belief that they are “well positioned to transform philanthropy for decades to come.”

As of press time, Time.fun’s model seems to present an entirely different paradigm. While crypto-based philanthropy isn’t entirely “novel” so to speak, its overall effectiveness in the grand scheme hasn’t really left too much of a dent for how the utilization of crypto-based assets, and certain non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can really make charitable giving easier for the average consumer who may not fully understand the mechanics of blockchain technology. This of course, excludes the clutch timing for which the crypto community came together in a great time of need after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Rather than simply converting digital wealth into charitable giving, Time.fun, instead, wants to leverage the most personal currency we possess—our “time“—into a tradeable commodity with built-in philanthropic purpose. Through this new partnership, $352,000 USD of those funds—representing the portion designated for St. Jude—will be processed through Donate.GG’s platform.

“We know the first mover is always a big deal,” said Leap, founder of Donate.gg. “The generous creator donations for St. Jude showcases the power of crypto to transform lives. Together, we’re proving that every action, big or small, can make the world a better place.”

Time.fun CMO, who goes by the name “PedroFounder”, shared that when the platform integrated the donation capability, “there wasn’t an easy way for [them] to send those funds to each organization. Donate.GG allows us to seamlessly transfer 100% of creator donations to St. Jude’s, and hopefully more organizations in the future.”

The Tokenization Gamble: Learning from Past Failures

At great misfortune, our current crypto landscape is littered with failed attempts to merge blockchain technology with social good. From charity tokens that collapsed amid regulatory scrutiny to NFT projects promising charitable impact that delivered little beyond speculative bubbles, the intersection of crypto and philanthropy has been fraught with broken promises, adding to the biggest issue the entire financial sector currently faces with respect to digital assets. Like bickering siblings in their mid-teenage years, the industry’s stunted growth continues to be entirely dependent upon how these cryptocurrencies and other digital securities are to be governed in the United States.

One of the more attractive qualities of Donate.GG’s framework that makes Time.fun’s model potentially different is its rejection of the typical “utility token” approach that has plagued so many crypto charitable initiatives. Instead of creating “artificial scarcity” through token mechanics, the platform derives its value from genuine scarcity—the finite nature of a creator’s time and attention.

“The generous creator donations for St. Jude showcases the power of crypto to transform lives. Together, we’re proving that every action, big or small, can make the world a better place,” Leap explained. 

In other words, the platform’s users can buy, trade, and redeem tokenized minutes for experiences ranging from direct messages to group chats and one-on-one calls, creating what Time.fun describes as “shared upside between creators and users.” This anchoring to real-world value could provide the stability that previous tokenization efforts lacked, also recognizing the painful fact that the U.S. is still ridiculously behind on what could otherwise be considered a fair starting point of how crypto and other digital assets are governed and under what ethical and regulatory frameworks.

However, skepticism remains warranted. Platform creators have long struggled with changing algorithms and shifting rules, as a former TikTok executive admitted: “We tweaked the algorithm every single day”—a reminder that creator economy platforms often prioritize platform interests over creator welfare.

Shifting to an “intimacy market”

Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of Time.fun’s model is what it reveals about our current cultural anatomy. We’ve moved beyond the “attention economy” into what might be called the “intimacy market“—where direct messages, personal calls, and one-on-one interactions become purchasable commodities.

Understandably, this raises further uncomfortable questions about the nature of human connection in digital spaces. When creators tokenize their personal time, are they empowering themselves through new revenue streams, or are they subjecting their most intimate asset—personal attention—to market forces? For those familiar with Sam Altman’s highly-controversial biometric project, WorldCoin, this sentiment is most definitely shared amongst cybersecurity and privacy experts.

The charitable component adds a moral complexity: does the philanthropic outcome justify the commoditization of human intimacy? Or to put it plainly, how do you distinguish “positive” exploitation from “negative” exploitation?

The Tax Haven of “Good” Intentions

As an example, crypto donations to Fidelity Charitable reached $688 million USD in 2024, up from just $49 million USD in 2023, according to Fidelity Charitable’s 2024 Giving Report. Driven partly by tax advantages for donating appreciated assets, this surge reveals how philanthropy and financial optimization have become inextricably linked—raising questions about whether Time.fun’s model represents genuine altruism or sophisticated tax engineering wrapped in social good.

The transparency promised by blockchain technology could address some of these concerns, allowing donors and recipients to track exactly how funds flow from creator earnings to charitable impact. But transparency in mechanism doesn’t necessarily equal transparency in motivation.

Beyond the Hype: Real-World Implementation Challenges

The partnership announcement glosses over significant operational challenges that have plagued crypto philanthropy initiatives. Converting volatile cryptocurrencies to stable funding for medical research requires sophisticated financial infrastructure. The volatility that makes crypto attractive for speculation makes it potentially problematic for organizations like St. Jude Children’s that need predictable funding streams.

Moreover, while 2025 promises real-time fund tracking and progress monitoring through blockchain, the reality of implementing such systems across diverse charitable organizations remains complex. Many nonprofits lack the technical infrastructure to fully leverage blockchain’s transparency benefits.

The Ripple Effect: Reimagining Charitable Infrastructure

If successful, the Donate.GG model could fundamentally alter how we think about charitable giving infrastructure — something Leap also wholeheartedly believes in. Rather than periodic campaigns or annual giving drives, this approach embeds philanthropy into the daily economic activities of creators and their audiences. Every DM purchased, every minute of time traded through Time.fun’s platform, becomes a “micro-donation”—transforming charity from an occasional act into a continuous background process of social commerce.

“Throughout the past year we set out to change the way people donate crypto, and this is the first step. It’s time to start giving back in a real way,” Leap said. “I love you dad, this is dedicated to you!”

Marc Sepulveda, Head of Web3 and Crypto Initiatives at St. Jude, acknowledged Leap’s ongoing dedication to raising more than $350,000 USD for St. Jude patients and their families, calling his efforts “an inspiration to many.”

The philosophy of philanthropy

This shift could democratize traditional philanthropy in unprecedented ways, allowing smaller creators to generate meaningful charitable impact without requiring massive audiences or significant personal wealth. But it also risks reducing complex social problems to transactional relationships mediated by platform algorithms (cough, Google Search/Instagram/X)

The Time.fun partnership with Donate.GG represents so much more than a novel fundraising mechanism—it’s a window into a future where our most personal resources become part of a broader economic ecosystem designed around social impact. Whether this future represents progress or a troubling commodification of human connection may depend on how thoughtfully we navigate the ethical questions it raises.

As we witness the intersection of creator economies, blockchain technology, and charitable giving, we’re forced to confront this fundamental question about the society we’re building:

Are our efforts to make cryptocurrency accessible to everyone leading us to commercialize things that should remain priceless—and if so, can positive charitable results truly justify this shift? Or, are we actually rediscovering empathy, a fundamental human value often overlooked?

Could democratizing something so precious as those last few moments with a loved one be leveraged to bring about something much bigger than ourselves, especially in times when our traditional sense of morality and ethics seems to be unraveling?