CharityVest is a startup Donor-Advised Fund (DAF) provider. DAFs are a way for people to invest their charitable contributions that can be distributed later. This EA Forum post states that CharityVest has the best features and lowest fees but is new and therefore risky.
This market is an attempt to provide some non-zero evidence about what that risk might be. These risks could mean trouble for the money people have given to CharityVest to hold or pass on to charities. I want to know if something might go wrong that would make people who've given money through CharityVest worry about where their money is going. The end date to watch is December 31, 2032 (roughly a decade into their when they started accepting investments). If there are any news stories or official announcements before then that make it sound like CharityVest is having a tough time with money in a way that could affect donors, I'll consider this a "yes." I'm keeping things simple: if there's news that would make you regret giving your money to CharityVest, that counts.
Resolution Criteria:
Financial Trouble: Includes dissolving donors' accounts due to inability to sustain operations, filing for bankruptcy, undergoing liquidation, or similar financial distress indicators.
Time Frame: Any such event must be confirmed to have occurred by December 31, 2032.
Verification: Must be verified through official announcements from CharityVest, credible media reports, financial statements, or legal documents made public.
Investor Concerns: The market will consider any action that directly impacts the security and intended use of donor funds as indicative of significant financial trouble.
Any comments about base rates or background info are welcome. Feel free to boost this if you find this a worthwhile market
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I looked more into Charityvest's legal structure and read their 2022 form 990 (can't read the 2023 form because the govt website is down all day for maintenance lol) and I updated my probability downward.
The legal structure is that Charityvest was founded concurrently with a for-profit corporation called Vennfi, Inc. Vennfi develops the technology and charges Charityvest a fee. Vennfi is supported by VC funding.
IANAL but based on my understanding, I think this is relatively favorable for donors. Charityvest does not owe any money to Vennfi (in 2022, Charityvest had no debt, its only liabilities were $16k of accounts payable, presumably bills owed to Vennfi). If Vennfi ran out of money, the VC investors could make bankruptcy claims against Vennfi, but not against Charityvest. If Charityvest failed along with Vennfi, it would have no reason to expropriate customer funds because it has no debt obligations (as of 2022).
One bad scenario I can imagine is if Vennfi's servers shut down without sufficient notice. If Charityvest shuts down, it needs to let users transfer their accounts to other DAF providers, but it can't do that if there are no servers. (Unless it has paper copies of everything, which I kind of doubt because it's a fancy tech startup type org, and anyway that would be way more of a pain for users. I signed up for Charityvest and I don't think they even have my mailing address so idk what they'd do if they were forced to rely on paper records only.) I don't think this is too big a concern because they should be able to see bankruptcy coming a few months in advance.
Thanks for making this market! I am the author of the post you linked and I'm currently working on some edits, and I'm debating how much I should weigh the stability of a DAF provider.
I just made a similar market for Daffy (https://manifold.markets/MichaelDickens/by-2034-what-is-the-probability-tha), I made it just before I found your market so the resolution criteria are different (more numerically precise but maybe too confusing)