How We Found Crypto Donation Platforms for Grad School Application Fees (No PayPal/Visa, Sanctioned Country)
Last November, I walked into our kitchen at 8:47pm to put away leftover chicken and found my oldest son, Luka, slouched against the fridge, staring at his laptop. His tutoring hoodie had a coffee stain on the cuff, half a plate of cold fried rice sat forgotten next to the mouse, and the University of Edinburgh’s application payment page glowed back at him. The $75 fee was clearly listed, but every “pay now” option we tried was grayed out or declined.
We live in Iran, so none of our Visa or Mastercard cards work for international payments. PayPal won’t even let us open an account. Luka had spent two years pulling this application together: studying for the GRE late after his online tutoring shifts, rewriting his personal statement 12 times, asking three professors for letters of recommendation. Everything was done except for paying that one fee.
We first asked a cousin living in Germany to cover the five application fees Luka needed, which added up to $360, but he’d just lost his job and couldn’t spare that much. We tried GoFundMe next, like every other crowdfunding idea, but the site blocked our account within an hour of creating it because of our location. Ko-fi locked us out a day later, after someone had already donated $40, and kept the funds. A friend on an academic Facebook thread suggested we try crypto donations, which I’d only ever heard about in the news in connection with weird scams and millionaire speculators. I was skeptical, but we had nothing to lose, so we started digging.
Over the next three nights, we tested a dozen different platforms, sorting through what worked and what didn’t, and I learned that for students in our position, crypto isn’t some fancy investment trend—it’s the only workaround that actually exists right now. I’m not here to promote anything, just to share what we figured out, because I’ve seen so many other parents and students in the same spot stuck with nowhere to turn.
First, we set up a free MetaMask wallet, which took about 10 minutes. You don’t need to give any ID or proof of address just to create a wallet that holds small amounts of crypto, which is perfect for our situation. We wrote down the 12-word seed phrase (the code that lets you access your money) in a notebook we keep in our kitchen drawer, so we never lose it. We didn’t touch anything complicated, just stuck with the basic setup. We also asked donors to send USDC, a stablecoin that doesn’t fluctuate in value, so we wouldn’t lose money to random price swings while we collected the full amount.
Next, we tested donation platforms. Coinbase won’t let anyone in our country open an account, so we skipped that right away. We found that NOWPayments lets you create a free public donation landing page in 15 minutes, connect your MetaMask wallet, and doesn’t block IPs or require full government ID verification for amounts under $1000, which is more than enough for most grad application fees. Another option that worked for another student we helped later was Coingate, which has a similar free donation page tool that doesn’t block users from sanctioned countries.
Gitcoin Grants is another good option if the student is involved in open source research or any public academic project, because it’s built for funding this kind of work and doesn’t block accounts based on our region. We didn’t use it for Luka, but two kids we helped this year got 70% of their fees through it, so it’s worth checking out.
The biggest mistake we almost made was using a big centralized platform that asks for a lot of personal information up front. Any platform tied to traditional banking will comply with international sanctions, so they’ll block you eventually, even if you get in at first. The key is sticking with platforms that let you connect your own self-hosted wallet, so you control the funds the whole time, no one can freeze them on a whim.
Once we had our donation page set up, Luka shared the link on his LinkedIn, where he posts his research on solar grid infrastructure, and on his X account. His former undergrad professor shared it to their network, and within four days we had all $360 in USDC in our wallet.
The last step was converting it to something the university would accept. We used Paxful, a peer-to-peer exchange, to trade the USDC for a prepaid Mastercard gift card from a seller based in Canada. The seller charged a 3% fee, which was totally worth it, and the card worked on the first try when we paid Luka’s application fees. We got the confirmation email an hour later, and Luka finally threw out that cold fried rice.
It’s not a fair system. No high achieving 22 year old should have to learn how to use crypto just to apply to grad school, just because of where they were born. Luka’s still waiting to hear back from most of his programs, so we don’t know how this will end. But over the last three months, we’ve helped five other students from our country set up their own donation pages using this same method, and all of them have been able to pay their application fees so far. It’s clunky, it’s not perfect, and it still feels wrong that this is the only option. But when you have no PayPal, no Visa, and no other way to pay, it works.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » How We Found Crypto Donation Platforms for Grad School Application Fees (No PayPal/Visa, Sanctioned Country)