Mozilla rolls back its crypto donation drive after receiving backlash

Just a week after Mozilla announced their crypto donation drive, they pulled it back after backlash and said they’re “listening, and taking action.”

The backlash started on December 21, when many open-source community members replied in exasperation to the tweet announcing the donation drive. It seemed that Mozilla wanted to branch out in the ongoing crypto frenzy across the globe. However, the campaign did not go as planned and had to be rolled back.

Although Mozilla has been accepting Bitcoin since 2014 for their foundation, the backlash was vast and swift when they announced about accepting other coins via BitPay. Many users also claimed that they were unaware of Mozilla accepting Bitcoins for donations too. 

A separated co-founder of Mozilla— Jamie Zawinski, also retweeted the announcement calling it a partnership with “planet-incinerating Ponzi grifters”, as reported by Today on January 5. He was joined by Peter Linss, the founder of Gecko (browser engine used in the Firefox), who said that he is 100% with Jamie on this matter. “You were meant to be better than this,” said Jamie while referring to Mozilla. 

“Decentralized web technology continues to be an important area for us to explore, but a lot has changed since we started accepting crypto donations,” Mozilla further tweeted while announcing the suspension of the donation drive. 

Currently, the organization is reassessing if its current policy on crypto donations fits with its ‘climate goals’. Until further review assessment is over, the donation drive will remain suspended. Its 211 million users will not be able to donate crypto anymore. 

Mozilla also said that the reassessment would be transparent in the spirit of the open-source process. It is not the first company to receive backlash for embracing crypto. Last month, the gaming community lashed out at Ubisoft after it announced the implementation of NFTs in its first-person shooter game “Ghost Recon Breakpoint”. Jason Citron, the CEO of Discord, recently teased a Metamask Ethereum wallet integration into its system; even he had to pull back. On the other hand, companies like Brave provide privacy-focused browsing. Despite embracing crypto, they have seen their user base surpass 50 million in 2021.