Three Years of the Universal Impact Pool

What if a community, not one big check, got to decide where a grant goes?

Back in June 2023, we launched the Universal Impact Pool (UIP) with Gitcoin as a small experiment with a big question: what if the community was the philanthropic signal? Instead of one funder deciding where money goes, every gift on Endaoment would count as a vote, and the pool would follow the crowd. We weren't sure a grantmaking experiment on public, onchain software would still be running three years later... and yet here we are! 💧

As of September 28, 2026, the pool has granted $362,226, compiled over time from rounds of about $25,000 going out to organizations across Endaoment every quarter.

The crowd as the signal

The original idea was simple. Nonprofits typically apply for restricted grants or orchestrate big campaigns to get funded, yet community support already signals their value. What if we could automatically route grant boosts to the organizations that have already earned it?

Collaboration became a hallmark of this creation. Our friends at Gitcoin had already created Allo, a protocol that powers a formula called quadratic funding, which cares more about how many people gave than how much each person gave. So forty friends giving $25 each earn a nonprofit a bigger share than one person writing a $1,000 check. At our one-year mark in June 2024, those rounds had added up to nearly $140,000 for more than 500 nonprofits.

Building with each other's work was a core tenet of what made onchain software so exciting to us. Like a mycelium network passing nutrients between trees underground, every new tool makes the next one easier to build onchain. It's this co-creative mindset that makes innovation genuinely responsive to systemic issues, faster, and ideally more efficient.

Three years in, however, the pool has grown into something bigger than a matching experiment. Our CEO, Robbie Heeger, sees it as the answer to one of the oldest questions about donor-advised funds.

A tool for throughput

As we grew into a full-scale donor-advised fund (DAF) provider, we saw how the pool mechanism could help reduce abandoned or idle DAFs. If a DAF holder walks away and never comes back to their DAF, the remaining funds can now be distributed to nonprofits doing great work, as determined by the community, without governance politics or roadblocks.

That's written into how we run funds. Under our Fund Agreement, if a fund goes two years and one quarter without meaningful grant activity, 10% of its balance can move into the pool each quarter until the fund is drained. From there, the community decides where it goes based on how they are donating and supporting nonprofits. Each quarter, 25% of the pool goes back out as grants.

"The UIP is alone in being the only programmatic solution to idle donor-advised funds that we've seen in production happening at scale. It serves as an important community-powered grant-making vehicle that reflects our value of throughput."

Robbie Heeger, President & CEO of Endaoment

For us, throughput means money that was given to nonprofits should actually reach them, and our technology has uniquely allowed us to design ways to articulate this in real time. One more exciting way the tool can be used is to support a donor who doesn't know where they want to give. By granting directly to the UIP, they can pass that decision on to the community each quarter.

Every gift is a passive vote of confidence

One of the most exciting parts of the pool is how little anyone has to do to get more funding to nonprofits. Nobody fills out a ballot. Grant recommendations and donations serve as passive votes of confidence for organizations, creating an efficient, effective, and ethical mechanism for taking idle capital sitting in donor-advised funds and turning it into an extra source of funding for nonprofits that are part of the cultural zeitgeist.

Three years of rounds show what that zeitgeist looks like. 👇

Hawaii Community Foundation. When the Maui wildfires hit in August 2023, just two months after we launched, the Endaoment community moved fast. Hawaii Community Foundation received nine contributions in the days that followed, and the next round added $14,900 on top of them. As of September 28, 2026, the foundation has received about $42,000 on Endaoment.

Crystal Hearts. Crystal Hearts gets supplies and life-saving equipment to civilians, combat medics, and frontline defenders in Ukraine. In the pool's first year, they shared their Endaoment profile on Farcaster (a social network where that profile pops up as a donate button!) and loads of people chipped in small amounts. That's exactly the kind of breadth the formula loves: 967 donations and about $125,000 on Endaoment as of September 28, 2026. 💛

Hand in Hand Parenting. Hand in Hand helps parents, educators, and healthcare workers get on the same page, so every adult in a child's life shows up with the same approach. In December 2023, they made one tiny change and pointed the main donate button on their website to their Endaoment page. By June 2024, those gifts had pulled in nearly $20,000 from the pool, and they've since received about $101,000 on Endaoment across 380 donations. All from one button!

Make Water. This one is fun and very Covid-coded. Make Water gets students and communities working on water and sanitation, and they raised on Endaoment for a pilot giving bidet attachments to low- and middle-income households. (Yes, bidets! They cut down on the toilet paper and wipes that clog local water systems.) Grants from the pool reached them along the way, and they've received about $138,000 on Endaoment as of September 28, 2026.

Vermont Asylum Assistance Project. The Vermont Asylum Assistance Project gives free immigration legal help to people in Vermont facing detention or deportation, or working to secure their status. They've received about $5,600 on Endaoment across two donations and 16 grants, and for a team their size, an unrestricted quarterly grant can change what they're able to take on.

The flaw was never the DAF

A common criticism of donor-advised funds is that money goes in and sits there. The fix can live in the product design of a DAF program, which can create positive feedback loops that answer that criticism.

The pool is our proof of that. Gifts become votes, votes become unrestricted grants, and nonprofits that rally their people (like Crystal Hearts and Hand in Hand) bring in more gifts for the next round.

Its "universal" design also has its limits, especially when there is a desire to target or verify the impact of a grant. Funds go to any org that is in good standing and passes our eligibility review, but recipients can't be chosen based on a theme, size, or current opinions. A round can split across many nonprofits into smaller check amounts, dwarfed by a single large grant.

Any gift brings you into the round

Any gift you make on Endaoment will always do double duty. The nonprofit is immediately supported, and the gift adds to that nonprofit's share of the pool, aka a bonus grant shortly after the round ends.

1. Find a nonprofit you love on Endaoment by name or EIN.
2. Donate with a card, stock, or crypto, or recommend a grant from your Endaoment DAF.
3. That's it! Your gift lands with the nonprofit and counts toward their share when the round closes.

Not sure who to support yet? You can always give to the pool itself, and those dollars will follow wherever the community gives next.

Robbie summed up three years better than we could: "It's very, very cool to see this experiment playing out in this way." We're so grateful to the Gitcoin team for building it with us, and stoked to keep playing with speed, collaboration, and unrestricted grants, and to keep showing what a DAF can do when the product is built to move money. 💧 Curious about the nuts and bolts? Our Universal Impact Pool documentation walks through the full formula.

Endaoment does not provide tax or legal advice. Please consult your own CPA or attorney about your specific situation.