In December 2017 an anonymous philanthropist established a charity accepting only Bitcoin, called Pineapple Fund. Having adopted Bitcoin early on, according to a post on Reddit, the donor found no use for excess amounts of money and wished to do something good with it. The announcement was made under the Reddit username /u/PineappleFund, and promised a massive $86m donation in Bitcoin-only funding for charitable works.

On January 10th this announcement was followed up with a further post relating to the non-profit organisation MAPS (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies). The anonymous benefactor has made a promise to match any donations raised by crowd-funding, in an amount up to $4m, for research into the benefits of MDMA (Ecstasy) in treating PTSD.

MDMA can be used to assist psychotherapy in the effective treatment of PTSD, and MAPS is hoping to raise $25m to carry out Phase 3 of the necessary drug trials. Of this amount, they have already raised $17m and need only the $8m which could be provided by Pineapple and matched donations.

The January 10th post calls on the cryptocurrency community to donate, and describes the positive results of the research up to Phase 2. The FDA granted MAPS a ‘Breakthrough Therapy Designation’ in August of last year, and the donor wishes to support their further research. No effective treatment for PTSD sufferers yet exists that is FDA-approved.