Trust is the working capital of philanthropy and it is in short supply. Donors rarely know whether their money reached its stated purpose, charities carry the reputational risk, and regulators demand transparency and data protection at the same time. We spoke with Alexander Belanov, founder and CEO of BLAGOCHAIN, about why he believes the answer is a purpose-built blockchain, and what it takes to make a donation provably spent on what it was given for.
Alexander Belanov (also known as WHYSASHA) is a fintech entrepreneur and blockchain developer with over five years building financial infrastructure across DeFi and digital assets. Before founding BLAGOCHAIN, he served as Chief Technology Officer of the cryptocurrency exchange Bitronit, where he led an engineering team and directed the technical architecture of a platform serving more than 200,000 users. He has also advised on Web3 architecture and tokenomics at Waves Enterprise and holds a visiting researcher position at Tsinghua University in Beijing. BLAGOCHAIN, his transparency platform for charitable organisations, won a grant from the Russian Foundation for Innovation Support and was named among the country’s Top 10 academic projects in 2024.
Since then BLAGOCHAIN has stood firmly on its own feet and grown into a full-scale, production-grade platform: today it serves 82 charitable funds across three commercial tiers, has tracked more than 287,000 transactions, and runs profitably at a higher than 70 percent gross margin. What started as a pure startup has matured into a working business. Now, Belanov argues, verifiable giving is not just an ideal but a viable commercial model.
Q: Let’s start with the problem. Charities already publish reports. Why isn’t that enough?
Alexander Belanov: Honestly, this began with me long before there was any product. I’d spent years working on financial infrastructure and DeFi, and the thing that always bothered me most was opacity: the fact that in so many systems you simply have to take someone’s word for it. A report is a promise, not a proof. A donor gives money “for treatment” or “for education,” and then has to trust that it was actually spent that way. The whole sector runs on that gap between intention and verification, and every fundraising scandal widens it.
You need a system that verifies itself, continuously and by design. That is where decentralised ledgers come in: their entire point is that information cannot be quietly altered or backdated, and no single party can rewrite history. Once that clicked, the rest almost followed on its own. The question stopped being “how do we report better” and became “how do we make misreporting impossible.”
That principle is what eventually became the protocol. The purpose of a donation is enforced by the protocol itself, not by the goodwill of the fund. Targeted money physically cannot be spent on something else. That is a rule of the state machine that every node in the network verifies, not a policy on a website.
Q: That is a strong claim. How does it actually work under the hood?
Alexander Belanov: Three properties make it work, and none of them exist together in ordinary “charity tokens” or public networks.
First, targeted accounting at the protocol level. Our ledger does not store “address → balance.” It stores “(address, purpose) → amount.” A transfer debits a specific purpose and credits a specific purpose, so targeted and untargeted money can never be co-mingled. It is mathematically impossible to mix them, because it is a rule of the machine state.
Second, verifiable targeted spending. This is our main differentiator. A fund can only spend after it publishes a report anchor on-chain and an authorised verifier confirms it. The spendable quota then equals exactly the amount raised at that moment. New donations that arrive after the confirmation are not covered, they require a fresh report. This removes what we call “sticky confirmation,” where one approval would silently unlock all future inflows.
Third, privacy by design. Only hashes and non-personal pointers ever touch the chain. Names, diagnoses, phone numbers and all other personal data never goes on-chain, and we prove that with explicit tests. Change the off-chain document and the on-chain hash breaks. You get verifiability and privacy as protocol properties, not as a trade-off.
Q: Why build your own blockchain instead of using Ethereum or a Layer 2 or just taking something like the Cosmos SDK and layering functionality on top?
Alexander Belanov: Because we did not want our chain of trust to depend on someone else’s protocol, economics, or governance and that is exactly the limitation of the common approach. A lot of companies indeed take a ready-made framework like the Cosmos SDK and build their features as a layer on top of it. We deliberately did the opposite. When you inherit someone else’s base layer, you also inherit their assumptions, their constraints, and their roadmap, and you can only bend the system so far before you are fighting the framework instead of solving your problem.
We run a permissioned network with on-chain governance of the validator set, predictable costs, and no speculative token getting in the way of the mission. Building the core ourselves means we can shape the protocol directly around the use cases we care about, which makes it far easier to scale and adapt for charitable giving and, increasingly, for government and public-sector transactions. That is a deliberate design goal: we want states and public institutions to be able to plug our technology in as an additional layer of trust on top of their existing processes, not to have to adopt someone else’s general-purpose chain and hope it fits.
The innovation was never “a blockchain” anyway as plenty of people have their own blockchain. The innovation is the method: targeted accounting, on-chain report anchors and statuses, and verifiable targeted spending combined into one protocol. That method is what we are patenting, and it is far harder to copy than code.
Q: Crypto has a credibility problem. How do you answer the security question, and the “isn’t this just hype” question?
Alexander Belanov: By treating BLAGOCHAIN as critical financial infrastructure, not a token launch. We did the unglamorous engineering work that most projects skip.
Our consensus core is a pure, formally verifiable state machine. We model-checked it in TLA+ for both safety and liveness, including Byzantine and multi-round scenarios, and we verify it with a deterministic simulator that injects network partitions, crashes and message reordering. Every block carries an embedded finality proof — a supermajority of signed precommits — which is checked on every path, including when a node restores from disk, so a node will refuse a forged block even if it loads from a tampered volume.
On cryptography we use audit-grade choices: ECDSA on the P-256 curve with deterministic nonces, enforced low-S signatures to prevent malleability, and Merkle trees with domain separation. The wallet is non-custodial: a donor’s private key is stored only in encrypted form, and the session key is imported as non-exportable, so it cannot be exfiltrated even if the website itself is compromised.
Security, for us, is a continuous process rather than a one-off claim. The platform has been through multiple external security audits, and on top of that we run our own internal bug-bounty programme, so that issues are surfaced and resolved continuously rather than in a single review that goes stale the moment it is published. Formal verification, independent external review, and a standing bounty is what separates infrastructure you can build a charity on from a project that just sounds exciting.
Unlike many blockchain projects, we do not publish the full source code. While we have experience developing in open-source environments, BLAGOCHAIN’s core architecture, protocol design and verification mechanisms form part of our proprietary technology and ongoing patent strategy. For that reason, external security reviews are conducted under NDA, allowing independent experts to thoroughly assess the system without requiring us to disclose commercially sensitive intellectual property.
Q: This is a genuinely novel approach as most teams in this space never go near building a base layer from scratch. Where does that capability come from? How did your team arrive at something this ambitious?
Alexander Belanov: I think it comes from refusing to treat this as a “crypto project.” Most blockchain teams come from one of two places: pure crypto, where the instinct is to ship a token fast, or pure academia, where things stay theoretical. We sit in the hard middle, building financial infrastructure that has to survive real users, real transactions, and real operational requirements.
That perspective was shaped long before BLAGOCHAIN existed. I had spent years leading engineering teams in the blockchain and digital asset industry, and many of the specialists who later joined the project had already worked together on DeFi products, exchange infrastructure, and enterprise blockchain systems. We were not assembling a startup team around an idea; we were an experienced engineering team looking for a problem worth solving.
The project brought together a rare combination of expertise: operating large-scale financial platforms, building permissioned blockchain networks where governance and predictable costs matter more than speculation, and applying research-driven methods such as formal verification to prove that systems behave as intended. Plenty of teams have one of those backgrounds; very few have all three in the same room. In many ways, BLAGOCHAIN is not the story of a startup discovering blockchain technology, but of an established blockchain engineering team applying years of infrastructure-building experience to solve a trust problem that had remained unsolved in the charitable sector.
Q: Every startup talks about successes. Were there any failures or painful lessons along the way?
Alexander Belanov: Absolutely. One of our biggest lessons came when we started onboarding our first real clients. The system had performed well in development and internal testing, but we underestimated how different production traffic would look. As transaction volumes increased, parts of the network struggled under load and we quickly realised that our testing assumptions had been too optimistic.
I’ll be honest, for a brief moment we even questioned whether building our own blockchain had been the right decision. Using an existing framework would certainly have been easier. But that experience also highlighted the value of having our own engineering team and our own technology stack. We were able to identify bottlenecks quickly, modify the protocol where necessary, and roll out improvements without being constrained by someone else’s architecture or roadmap.
It was an uncomfortable moment, but also an important one. We paused, reworked our load-testing methodology, introduced more realistic stress scenarios, strengthened monitoring, and optimised several core components of the network. The experience taught us that real-world adoption is the only true test of infrastructure.
We also went through a difficult financial period in the early days, including a temporary cash-flow gap while we were investing heavily in the platform. Fortunately, we worked through it without compromising the product or the team. Since then, we have been far more rigorous about testing systems at scales beyond what we currently need, not just for where the platform is today, but for where we expect it to be in the future.
Q: Let’s talk traction. Who actually pays for this, and how big is it?
Alexander Belanov: It is a business-to-business SaaS model, priced in three tiers. As of mid-2026 we have dozens of funds on the platform, ranging from small organisations to large established ones, and we have processed hundreds of thousands of transactions across thousands of donor wallets, a meaningful share of them active every month. The reason the economics work is that trust is sticky: once a fund proves its spending on-chain and its donors can see it, retention climbs sharply. Donors who join later stay with the platform at roughly twice the rate of our earliest cohorts.
Q: You’re already expanding internationally. Where is this going?
Alexander Belanov: The trust problem is not Russia or CIS specific, it is universal, and that is exactly why we are already working with international charities, not just domestic ones. The UK’s charity sector alone moves tens of billions of pounds a year and still runs largely on annual reports and goodwill. Beyond the UK, we are actively evaluating expansion opportunities in markets such as South Africa and Australia, where charitable organisations, grant programmes, and public institutions face many of the same transparency challenges. While regulations differ, the underlying need for verifiable trust is universal.
Our protocol is jurisdiction-neutral by design. While regulatory requirements and KYC/AML procedures vary between countries, the underlying trust problem remains the same. We keep compliance requirements separate from the consensus layer, allowing organisations in different jurisdictions to adapt the platform to local regulations without changing the core protocol. We are moving along three fronts at once: from local charities to international NGOs, into government and public-sector grant transparency, and into markets where verifiable, purpose-bound giving carries real cultural and social importance..
Q: What is the bigger idea you want people to take away?
Alexander Belanov: Transparency and privacy are not opposites. You can let a donor verify that their money arrived where it was meant to, written immutably to a ledger, without ever exposing a single beneficiary’s personal data. I believe many of the world’s trust problems exist because verification is still difficult, expensive, or impossible. We built BLAGOCHAIN around the idea that trust should not depend solely on institutions, intermediaries, or reputation, but on systems that can prove what happened.
Charitable giving is only one application of that idea. If we can make transparency verifiable while preserving privacy, the same approach can eventually help strengthen trust across public services, grant distribution, and many other areas where accountability matters.
At the same time, I do not think any single startup can change the world on its own. Real change usually happens through thousands of small improvements made by people and organisations solving specific problems. Our goal is simply to make one meaningful contribution in that direction and leave the systems we touch more transparent, accountable, and trustworthy than we found them.
To learn more about BLAGOCHAIN, visit blagochain.com
