Monero has paid for its development with voluntary donations since it launched in 2014. It has no dev tax and never sold a token.
Bitcoin's open-source funds run on the same principle. BCH-1 studied four of these funds and built on what they proved.
Since 2020 the Bitcoin Cash community has crowdfunded 18,201 BCH, about $10M. Monero took more than a decade to raise the same through its CCS. Bitcoin Cash did it in six years. That means Bitcoin Cash has raised more money than Monero in the same period of time.
Bitcoin Cash was built for payments. Today Monero processes more than twice as many transactions, and Bitcoin Cash's reach and user base have barely moved.
Monero's model tracks what each donation delivered. Bitcoin Cash has no shared record, so donors cannot see which spending worked, and the next campaign starts from zero trust.
| Bitcoin | Monero | Bitcoin Cash | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Donated to development | $30M+OpenSats alone | ~$10Mthrough the CCS, all time | ~$10M18,201 BCH since 2020 |
| Transactions last 12 months, est. | ~235M | ~11M | ~4.4M |
| Usage | Global | Hidden, but its community size and marketplaces show it is large | Negligible. Mostly exchange transactions, with negligible commerce and DeFi |
| Community size | Massive | Large | Tiny |
| Capital allocators | Multiple | Multiple | None |
| Delivery tracking | Published grants and progress reports | Escrow and milestone payouts | None shared |
| Funding reports | OpenSats financial statements | General Fund reports | None until BCH-1 |
Two pieces carry the whole model. A small Core Team stewards both. Its job is custody and verification. The community decides what gets funded.
A developer posts a proposal with a budget and milestones. The community debates it in public, then funds it directly in XMR.
Money sits in escrow and pays out only as each milestone is delivered.
Donations to the project itself go here. The Core Team uses it for shared costs that nobody crowdfunds, like servers.
It also backstops the CCS. When the CCS wallet was robbed in 2023, the General Fund covered the loss so developers kept getting paid.
Monero's system works. It also has two known weak points, and BCH-1 is designed around both of them.
The CCS wallet was drained of 2,675.73 XMR, about $437,000, in nine transactions over nine minutes. The cause was never found. The theft led to a public proposal to break up the Core Team.
The General Fund published a transparency report covering 2019 to mid-2020. Since then the community has had to ask for more, and volunteers track the fund themselves.
BCH-1 never holds campaign money. Projects raise on FundMe.cash, where pledges stay in non-custodial smart contracts until a campaign succeeds.
BCH-1 publishes on a fixed schedule. Every Core Fund transaction is in a public ledger, and each quarterly report is hashed on-chain so any later edit is detectable.
The Core Team holds the keys. From Phase 2 the Core Fund sits in a Core Team multisig, so no single person can move it. If the lead is compromised or stops acting in Bitcoin Cash's interest, the Core Team can remove them and keep the fund safe. The same keys let a lead who wants to step down hand the fund over cleanly.
Each of these funds runs on voluntary donations and publishes its work. BCH-1 took one working idea from each of them.
The community funds public proposals directly, and each one pays out by milestone. An unpaid Core Team holds the escrow.
Part of MAGIC Grants, a US nonprofit. The committee finds important work itself and raises for it, like a $50K fuzzing project to harden Monero's code.
Funds free and open-source Bitcoin work. It publishes every grant along with its financial statements.
Funds independent Bitcoin Core developers. Founding sponsors cover the running costs, so donors know exactly where their money goes.
Each of these funds reports on its own grants. BCH-1 reports on the whole Bitcoin Cash ecosystem, including money that never passes through BCH-1.
FundMe.cash already handles crowdfunding well, so BCH-1 builds the accountability layer over it. Donors and investors see where BCH money went and what it produced.
BCH-1 adapts these models for Bitcoin Cash. The scope and structure are its own.
Dollar figures are approximate, valued near the time of donation, and come from community tracking and press reports. The OpenSats total is a third-party estimate. The 2023 theft figures come from The Register, 8 November 2023. The BCH total comes from BCH Atlas records of campaigns since 2020. The Bitcoin figure counts OpenSats grants only. Transaction counts for the last 12 months are estimated from 24-hour counts on BitInfoCharts, 1 October 2026.