Crowdfunding is -according to Wikipedia- “the practice of funding a project or venture by raising monetary contributions from a large number of people, today often performed via internet-mediated registries, but the concept can also be executed through mail-order subscriptions, benefit events, and other methods”. Both Crowdfunding and Peer to Peer (P2P) funding (though they differentiate in some ways), come under the generic term “alternative finance”, which describes finance that comes from sources alternative to the traditional places (banks and venture capital trusts, for example).