"Baby, baby, baby, let's investigate
The other side of life tonight.
The lovers and the fighters
And the risks they take
Are on the other side of life tonight..."

-- "The Other Side of Life" by The Moody Blues

If the internet is a mirror maze, then the cryptoverse is that on a low-calorie diet, no sleep, and LSD. Even Ray Bradbury could scarcely imagine the thousand booth babes, spinning wheels of chance, provably fair games, or the flashing, whirling, zooming, jumping, mind-melting visual overload.

There is another side to the cryptoverse, though. Coin foundations live here, as do crypto-based non-profits like GivePact, Endaoment, and GitCoin. You'll also find resources on how coins work, and classes on coding. You might even encounter people donating crypto. What is this strange world you speak of? Welcome to the other side of (crypto) life.

This time we'll focus on non-profits. Yes, the Benedictine monks are awesome (vows of poverty and all that), but non-profit doesn't mean penniless; it means "not for profit", that is, the money that non-profits earn is incidental to their mission. Investopedia lays it out in their article here. Finally, yes crypto non-profits pay their talent; sorry if you had visions of a drum circle or something.

The cryptoverse houses three types of crypto non-profits. Coin and technical foundations support particular coins or interoperability goals (for example, the Ethereum foundation. However, the history of crypto foundations is mixed. The Bitcoin foundation apparently was established to pay the salary of certain individuals (see here). This Coindesk article explains some of the murky situations that crypto foundations often find themselves in. Yet on the whole, they do more good than not.

The second type provides an ecosystem that allows non-profits to build their own dapps, issue coins, and so forth. It sounds great, but doing a grant scan on Gitcoin hacked up errors. Endaoment takes a similar approach, though it's a bit higher-level and user-friendly. The Giving Block even offers a Wordpress plugin so folks can contribute straight from WP sites.

So, how about crypto-only non-profits dedicated to specific causes? Outside of a few PACs, I couldn't find any. There's still a way to go on that front, but otherwise, the other side of life is looking calm, peaceful, and giving. Give it a whirl whenever you get tired of the gambling metropolis side of crypto.

(All art by me. h/t to the Moody Blues for the concept.)