The Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that owns and curates noted online encyclopedia Wikipedia, has received more than $140,000 in bitcoin donations since it began accepting contributions in the digital currency last week.

The news follows the announcement of the organization’s partnership with California-based payments processor Coinbase to accept bitcoin on 30th July, a development that was widely seen as a validation of bitcoin’s potential to impact non-profit fundraising.

Coinbase revealed the fundraising milestone in a new blog post, saying that the $140,000 – an amount worth approximately 237 BTC – is a sign that bitcoin and the open-source site will continue to prove to be a powerful combination.

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The company added: “We were particularly excited to enable the Wikimedia Foundation to accept bitcoin donations because we feel that the decentralized, inclusive nature of Wikipedia is well aligned with bitcoin and we wanted to help the bitcoin community contribute to the democratization of information.”

The Wikimedia Foundation had been internally discussing the addition of a bitcoin donation option for months as grassroots support within its community grew. Notably, Coinbase announced on 1st August that it had dropped all processing fees for the non-profits it serves, including the Wikimedia Foundation.

In the past, the Wikimedia Foundation has said that the decision was made only after strong internal debate about the legal and financial implications of doing so. The company previously said: “Using Coinbase, a bitcoin exchange, we’re able to immediately convert bitcoin to US dollars, requiring minimal technical implementation on our end. Since we now also have guidance on how to account for bitcoin, there is a clear understanding of how to legally manage it.”

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Security firm Kaspersky Lab has found that bitcoin is the target in more than one fifth of all malware attacks aimed at victims’ money. According to Kaspersky’s latest threat report, entitled ‘IT Threat Evolution Q2 2014’, bitcoin mining malware accounted for 14% of attacks in the second quarter of 2014, while bitcoin wallet stealers accounted for 8%.

Keyloggers, which can be used to compromise both bitcoin and banking services, also made the list, with 4% of all attacks attributed to various forms of key logging malware. Traditional banking malware still leads the way with 74%, but considering the size of the bitcoin economy it is clear that bitcoin users and operators face a significant likelihood of being subjected to an attack.

Although the figures are disturbing, the relative number of bitcoin-related malware attacks has actually gone down since Kaspersky’s last annual report. In the 2013 report, bitcoin wallet stealers accounted for 20.18% of all financial malware attacks, while mining malware accounted for 8.91%, giving a combined total of 29%.

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“Fraudsters are also happy to use computing resources to generate crypto currency: bitcoin miners account for 14% of all financial attacks,” the report warns. “Criminals also use keyloggers to collect user credentials for online banking and payment systems in another bid to access bank accounts.”

In the meantime, the number of threats has gone down, but the threat landscape has evolved – as wallet stealers fell out of favour, mining malware took their place as the predominant form of bitcoin-related malware. Several security firms have issued reports mentioning bitcoin malware in recent months, with the number of attacks rising sharply since early 2013 in parallel with bitcoin’s massive peak in popularity.

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