A look at two tech efforts helping people make bail: Appolition for donating spare change from purchases and Bail Bloc for mining Monero with spare PC resources
Kate Knibbs / The Ringer :
Context & Ripple Effects
Two volunteer-built tools are attacking the same bottleneck from opposite ends: Appolition skims spare change off everyday card purchases into bail funds, while Bail Bloc turns idle PC cycles into mined Monero donated the same way. Both treat bail as a rounding-error problem — the premise being that people who would never write a $500 check will let an app siphon pennies instead.
The timing matters because the policy ground was already shifting: a year later California moved to replace cash bail entirely with an algorithmic risk-assessment system, and these apps are what happens when that reform hasn't arrived yet — private infrastructure filling a gap the state still owns.
First-order effects
- Bail funds gain two passive donation rails that require no deliberate giving decision, widening their donor base beyond people who actively follow criminal-justice issues.
Second-order effects
- Both routes depend on intermediaries that don't answer to bail funds — card networks for Appolition, exchanges and wallets for Monero — and the later PayPal and Venmo transfer limits and security freezes that stalled pandemic-era bail efforts show exactly how those chokepoints fail under load.
Third-order effects
- The crypto leg foreshadows a recurring trade-off activists keep hitting: the same blockchain rails that enable frictionless fundraising carry complexity and traceability problems, as later abortion-rights crypto fundraising efforts found. If cash bail survives in most jurisdictions, expect more of this volunteer infrastructure — and more fights over who controls the payment pipes it runs on.
The trend: Activist mutual-aid fundraising is migrating onto consumer fintech and crypto rails, which makes payment-platform operators de facto gatekeepers of bail and protest finance.