Crypto philanthropy is emerging as a meaningful funding stream, particularly among younger and wealthier donor demographics. Photo by Nikolas Kokovlis/NurPhoto via Getty Images

In the past year, the Toledo Museum of Art received several dozen works on paper by the Pop artist Marisol, a series of black-and-white photographs by Brett Weston, two sculptures by Roxy Paine, a painting by Richard Diebenkorn, four sculptural works by Martin Puryear and a linoleum-cut print by Kara Walker, among other artworks. Most donations to the museum, of course, came in the form of cash—such as the gift from one local family that funded free parking for visitors for 10 years—but not all. Other gifts included shares in startup businesses (a pharmaceutical and a tech company among them), an estate and cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Solana, and others.

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“There is a lot of flexibility in the kinds of donations we will accept,” Adam Levine, the museum’s director, told Observer. The museum’s board determines the types of gifts the institution will accept, and it becomes the development department’s job to figure out what to do with donations that aren’t artworks or cash. “We don’t have people on staff with expertise in real estate and crypto and startup companies,” he said, adding that the museum can “accept a variety of things, generally liquidating them immediately.”

The estate, for instance, was turned over to realtors who sold the house and property for $800,000, while the crypto was deposited in an account at The Giving Block, a Pennsylvania-based platform that helps nonprofits convert cryptocurrency donations into usable cash. The Toledo........

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