On Day 11, I ran a side project through my AI coach. Five dimensions, each scored 1 to 5. It landed at 22 out of 25. Mission alignment: 5. Content value: 5. Prospecting value: 5. Downside risk: 5. Revenue timing: 2 — the only weak spot, but I'd already been told I had revenues coming.
The vibe was a 5. Rare for me. Usually something's slightly off. Not this time.
So I started building.
48 Hours to a Working Prototype
In a couple of days, I had something working. A way for small charities to collect donations — small ones, a couple of dollars, a couple of pounds — using x402, the new internet payment protocol I wrote about on Day 11. Zero platform fees. No intermediary taking a cut. The charity keeps 100% of every donation.
This matters more than it sounds. If you've ever tried to donate £2 to a small charity through a normal payment processor, £1.50 of that goes to fees. The charity gets 50p. At scale, this is millions of pounds in transaction costs being siphoned away from organisations that survive on £10 and £20 donations.
The prototype worked. It was live. I could send a real donation to the Finn Wardman World Explorer Fund — something I'd spent months trying to solve because the WEF is based in Bermuda, where the banking infrastructure makes international small donations genuinely painful.
Then I tried to onboard my first external charity.
The Call That Changed the Project
I got on a call with a charity trustee who runs a youth surf therapy programme. Good guy, sharp, experienced. He'd been running charities for nearly two decades. I walked him through the setup. Downloaded the wallet app. Got it configured. Shared the address for a test donation.
He was interested. He could see the value immediately.
Then the governance questions started.
The wallet was set up under his personal name. He's a registered trustee. If he's receiving funds on behalf of a charity through a personal account, that's a liability problem. Where's the audit trail? How does this connect to the charity's bank account? What does he tell the charity commission? What happens if a trustee gets accused of fraud because the money flow isn't transparent?
He wasn't being difficult. He was being a responsible trustee. And every single question was legitimate.
The Problem Nobody's Solving
Here's what I didn't fully appreciate before that call: the technical problem of moving money cheaply is actually the easy part. x402 solves that. Stablecoins solve that. The hard part — the thing that stops every small charity from adopting any of this — is governance.
Charities are regulated. Trustees have fiduciary duties. In the UK, the Charity Commission has rules about how funds are collected and managed. In the US, 501(c)(3) organisations have IRS reporting requirements. In South Africa, NPCs report to the Department of Social Development. In Bermuda, where the Finn Foundation is based, it's the Charities Act.
Every jurisdiction has the same fundamental problem: a charity trustee cannot accept donations through a personal crypto wallet and stay compliant. There's no audit trail. There's no link to the charity's official bank account. There's no governance framework that says "this wallet belongs to this registered charity and here's how the money flows."
And nobody is building one.
I've looked. There are crypto donation platforms. There are blockchain-for-good initiatives. There are compliance tools for large financial institutions. But there's nothing — zero — that gives a small charity with no tech department a simple governance framework for accepting crypto donations. No wallet custody template. No regulator-compatible audit trail. No trustee liability guidance.
Why not? Because there's no money in it. Charities can't pay for compliance infrastructure. The market is small, fragmented, and regulated differently in every country. The kind of person who builds crypto infrastructure is usually chasing DeFi margins, not helping a 30-kid surf charity in London figure out how to tell the Charity Commission about a £5 USDC donation.
So Why Am I Doing This?
Ran it back through the coach. Here's what came out.
The governance problem doesn't make the project weaker. It makes it stronger. Anyone can build a payment widget. Nobody wants to solve the compliance layer for small charities across multiple jurisdictions. That's the moat. Not the code.
Part curiosity. I want to know if you can build a lightweight governance framework that works across the UK, US, South Africa, and Bermuda without requiring a charity to hire a lawyer. Jurisdiction-agnostic core, country-specific addenda. That's an interesting puzzle.
Part Finn Foundation. The WEF is a Bermuda-based endowment. It doesn't have a compliance department. It needs exactly what I'm building — a way to accept small international donations with proper audit trails that satisfy Bermuda's charity regulators. If I solve this for the WEF, I solve it for every small charity outside the usual US/UK infrastructure.
Part mission. Every youth charity I bring into this project is a conversation I want to have anyway. Not about payment infrastructure. About what they do, who they serve, what they need. These are my people — surf therapy, adventure grants, mentorship, music. The payment thing is the excuse to call. The relationship is the point.
And partly because the trustee who flagged all these problems? He chairs an organisation that's connected to a network of charity CEOs across the UK. Solve governance and that network opens up. Don't solve it and nobody will recommend you. Simple.
The Grant and What's Next
I'm applying for a grant to fund this work. I won't say which one because the deadline is in two weeks and I'd rather not have competition. If that one doesn't land, there are about ten others I can apply to — including some connected to markets that I know well enough to have real conversations about this.
The prototype is live. The governance layer is now the main event. And the thing I thought was a blocker turned out to be the most interesting part of the entire project.
Would anyone else build this? I doubt it. There's frankly zero money at the end of this. It's a labour of love that solves a real problem for a small, underserved market.
Even better question: so why the heck am I doing it?
Because a thin voice is speaking to me. And I'm trying to follow it.
The Numbers
My ONE Thing for the month is to land one client. I've got a verbal on that, and I'm committing to a long meeting on spec tomorrow because I 100% trust that I'll get paid. So revenues aren't booked yet, but they're coming.
Revenue: $0 | Clients: 1 | Prospects: 4
Day 13 of 365.