Investigate different options how to transfer money from the fund to recipients.

[s-matyukevich]

For every possible option we need:

1. The proof that it is legal
2. The plan how to handle taxation (for the fund itself and for the recipients)
3. Estimate/minimize transfer fees
4. Describe the overhead of legal procedures required to set up a particular payment option.
5. Describe any other risks associated with a particular payment option.

We should choose options accordingly to the following criteria:

1. Easy for the donors and recipients to use.
2. Have minimal transfer overhead. (Ideally, we would want to legally avoid taxation, which should be possible for donations)
3. Are hard for the Belorussian government to intervene.

A few options that I have in mind:

1. Checking account in a US bank. Use wire transfers to send money to recipients. Use Stripe to easily allow payments from credit/debit cards. This will probably require to register a charitable non-profit organization and make it to own the account. For the recipients, they most likely will have to provide their Belorussian bank account number. Recipients won't have to pay taxes as it is a donation link1 link2 We also should investigate the possibility to send money directly to credit/debit cards. Strips allow this but looks like Belarus isn't listed in the list of supported countries link Also we can use PayPal instead of Stripe if it has better support for Belarus.
2. Use Money services such as WesternUnion. This makes it easier for the recipients to receive money (just go the Western Union office with passport, no bank account needed) however, I am not sure whether their limits are acceptable. Also, the have high transfer fees.
3. Use cryptocurrency such as bitcoin or ethereum to send money. This makes it easy to transfer, but then the recipient should convert the cryptocurrency back to normal money. This also makes the process of receiving money fully anonymous, which is obviously good for us.
4. Make the process fully decentralized. Only connect people together and describe how they can send money to each other. We can still make the process kind-of fair because we can ask both sender and recipient to confirm the sum send/received and tell potential donors whom to help in the first place. This also makes it super easy for the platform to operate from a legal standpoint: as we don't touch people's money we don't need to set up any legal entity and don't have to worry about the security of our bank account and payment credentials. Also no need to integrate with any payment platform. The drawback here is that it makes it harder to send/receive money (especially for donors) However because it makes it harder for me to send the money it gives me full control over whom I am sending them to - this could be important thing for a lot of people. Another drawback is that in this case, we can't display the amount of money currently in the fund, which makes it harder for people to measure their chances of receiving support.

I think that we may end up having a combination of payment methods. We may start with option 4 because it is probably the easiest to set up from a legal and technical standpoint.

[s-matyukevich]

If we proceed with option number 4 we can use services like plati.tut.by to instruct people how to transfer money between themselves directly. It should be very easy to setup. We probably can support a lot of options like this. We should also think about how to make it possible for people from abroad to directly support people in Belarus. Services like WesternUnion should work, but they aren't very easy to use.

[s-matyukevich]

Как вариант для междунродных переводов можно использовать SWIFT - он поддерживается практически всеми белорусскими и зарубежными банками. https://belarusbank.by/ru/fizicheskim_licam/international_transfers

Тут перечислены данные которые нужно будет передать отправителю: https://belarusbank.by/ru/fizicheskim_licam/international_transfers/bankovskie_perevody/27704

Тут перечислены требования к получателю https://belarusbank.by/ru/fizicheskim_licam/international_transfers/29382