The Pineapple Fund: 5,104 Bitcoins, $55 Million, and an Unrevealed Donor

A Pledge Posted at $17,539

On December 13, 2017, a Reddit account named PineappleFund introduced itself to r/Bitcoin with an unusual sentence: “I'm donating 5057 BTC to charitable causes!” — 5,057 coins that Pine, the pseudonymous holder behind the account, valued at roughly $86 million. The post recalled watching bitcoin climb “$15.. $20.. $30.. wow!” and ended at a number its author could still hardly believe: “Today, I see $17,539 per BTC.”^[1]

Bitcoin has changed my life, and I have far more money than I can ever spend. My aims, goals, and motivations in life have nothing to do with having XX million or being the mega rich. So I'm doing something else: donating the majority of my bitcoins to charitable causes.^[1]

— Pine, announcement post, r/Bitcoin, December 13, 2017

What made the post different from a promise was that the giving had already started. Pine listed $1 million to Watsi, $1 million to The Water Project, and $500,000 to BitGive as done, with a $1 million donation to the Electronic Frontier Foundation underway. The fund's name, its website explained in an FAQ, was not a metaphor: “I really like pineapple.” Pine also promised to publish the transactions on the website so readers could follow the giving.^[1][2][3]

The Receipts Begin the Next Day

Independent confirmation arrived within twenty-four hours. On December 14, 2017, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) announced it had received 59.89 BTC — $1 million at the recipient's valuation — from the Pineapple Fund, part of what MAPS described as “a plan to give away over $86 million in BTC to charities and causes around the world.”^[5]

That receipt is still checkable on the blockchain. The transaction the fund lists for MAPS confirms at 12:10 UTC on December 14, 2017: 59.89 BTC paid out to MAPS, with 4,829.489 BTC in change returning to the fund's published donation address, 3P3QsMVK89JBNqZQv5zMAKG8FK3kJM4rjt. The change output is the tell — the wallet making the gift demonstrably held thousands more coins.^[13][2]

Other recipients published their own records. On January 30, 2018, the Free Software Foundation announced 91.45 BTC — $1 million — alongside Pine's note that “Free software is more than open source; it is a movement that encourages community collaboration and protects users' freedom.” Nineteen days earlier, OpenStreetMap's blog had cleared up a small mystery of its own: a 2.3 BTC donation that arrived first was not Pineapple Fund money; the 18 BTC that followed — over €200,000 — was.^[6][8]

The fund published transaction IDs alongside all 60 listed causes and posted its donation address with a signed proof of ownership. Selected transfers, including the MAPS payment, remain independently checkable on-chain. A New York Times passage reprinted by the fund explained how Bitcoin's public ledger made donations checkable. The published list is a starting point for verification, not a third-party audit of the entire fund.^[3][2][13]

Gut, Trust, and Ten Thousand Applications

Choosing who got the money ran on an unusual filter for a bitcoin fortune Pine valued at roughly $86 million. Applications were open to nonprofits worldwide, and the fund said it received more than 10,000 in roughly five months. Speaking to The Guardian by phone on condition of anonymity, Pine named three criteria — impact, innovation, efficiency — and then the honest one: “But to be honest, the biggest factor is my gut. I only fund charities that I trust.”^[2][7]

The range that produced was deliberately wide. On December 27, 2017, Pine announced a $5 million gift to GiveDirectly for direct cash transfers by posting the transaction ID on Reddit; the payment confirms on-chain that same afternoon. The three largest line items in the final tally — MAPS, GiveDirectly, and the Open Medicine Foundation, at $5 million each — were also reported by CCN. And not everything funded was a registered charity: five entries on the fund's site carry its own flag, “Not a nonprofit; supported on a basis of social benefit in our focus area.”^[10][3][9]

The MAPS money shows how the research gifts were structured. Its $5 million total combined an initial $1 million donation with a matching campaign Pine announced on January 10, 2018 — the fund would double every donation to MAPS up to $4 million, funding Phase 3 clinical trials of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, a program Pine noted carried an FDA Breakthrough Therapy designation. Pine's own farewell described the cause exactly as “clinical trials” — research funding, in a field where nothing in these records amounts to an approved treatment.^[11][4][3]

More Bitcoins, Fewer Dollars

When Pine signed off on May 10, 2018, the totals had moved in two directions. The completed figure — 5,104 BTC converted into $55 million for 60 causes — is the fund's own accounting, reported the next day by CCN and Yahoo Finance. Against the original pledge it is, by simple subtraction, 47 more bitcoins than the 5,057 announced, and about $31 million fewer dollars than the $86 million valuation quoted at launch.^[4][2][9]

The arithmetic explains the gap without needing a market narrative. On the fund's published figures, $55.75 million across 5,104 BTC averages roughly $10,900 per coin converted — against the $17,539 Pine quoted in December. The same coins, converted into a falling market, bought fewer dollars. No source explains why the final bitcoin count exceeded the pledge; none is needed to see what the numbers did.^[3][1]

Farewell, and Maybe Dessert

It's been five months, and having just made my last PF donation to the Internet Archive, I figure it might be a good time to say farewell.^[4]

— Pine, farewell post, r/Bitcoin, May 10, 2018

The post thanked the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency community “for turning a Sourceforge project into a $0.5T industry,” and admitted one nostalgia: “I kind of miss the old times when bitcoin was a small community, and you could count the number of 'altcoins' with one hand.” It counted the experiment's result — “5104 BTC was turned into $55 million for charities, from providing clean water, open mapping, to clinical trials of MDMA as treatment for PTSD” — and closed with a hint and an instruction: “I'm going to say goodbye now, but maybe there's room for dessert in a few years. If you're ever blessed with crypto fortune, consider supporting what you aspire our world to be.”^[4]

In the site's farewell letter, Pine said anonymity kept the focus on the fund and called the project a success.^[2]

What an Anonymous Giver Leaves Behind

Across the sources cited here, no verified name, gender or country is given for Pine. The Guardian's telephone interview was conducted on condition of anonymity. Coverage worked around that gap: The Guardian used “they,” while a New York Times excerpt used “he or she.” Readers were left with the public identity Pine chose: a pseudonym and a pineapple.^[7][2]

A later documented reappearance concerned a maintenance errand. On December 27, 2020, Pine posted to r/NameCheap explaining that pineapplefund.org had been suspended after a spam complaint — “Pineapple Fund does NOT send spam,” the post read, warning that scammers impersonate the fund — and that the domain was about to slip out of its grace period. The thread ends with a one-line edit: “Resolved rapidly.”^[12]

The site still lists 60 causes and transaction IDs, while independently checked payments such as MAPS remain confirmed on-chain. That record does not reveal everything about the fund or its donor. It does leave something concrete to follow: an anonymous promise, recipients' acknowledgments and traces of the giving.^[2][3][13]