AmericaSCORES, a non-profit organization in the San Francisco Bay Area that provides proven benefits to student learning, health, and social-emotional skills of over 2,000 low-income youth, now accepts payments in cryptocurrencies.

According to a Dec. 5 announcement by the firm, AmericaSCORES partnered with blockchain technology and design firm Totem Block and crypto payments processor BitPay, to facilitate the new crypto donations channel which comes with a lot of benefits.

Among such benefits, the release highlighted that giving in cryptocurrency can provide a tax relief option and local end-of-year charitable opportunity for donors.

However, non-profits are yets to plug into this opportunity with just 2% of all donations to charity—billions of dollars in the U.S.— in 2018 being made with cryptocurrency.

Bay Area primarily represents an opportunity for the nonprofit, given that very few such organizations in the area can accept cryptocurrency donations, despite the location being home to many large holding cryptocurrency users.

Commenting on the development, CEO of AmericaSCORES Bay Area Colin Schmidt described accept Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies as a natural step for his organization, adding:

We want to show that there are many ways to use cryptocurrency, which can practically benefit both an organization and a donor through transparency, securely and easily through a partner like Bitpay.”

While using BitPay at its payment process means that SCORES will receive Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, or Ether from a donor, the non-profit retains the option to choose whether or not to hold on to the cryptocurrencies or convert to fiat.

Coinfomania had earlier reported that although several organizations immediately convert their crypto earning to fiat, others like an email service provider, ProtonMail believes so much in Bitcoin that they’ve been holding their assets for several years.

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