Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has pledged $100 million for Covid relief. This donation is in addition to the $90 million that was donated last year through the Crypto Relief project.
The Donation
Buterin, along with Polygon’s Sandeep Nailwal, jointly decided that there were high-impact projects that needed follow-through grants. Therefore, they decided to donate $100 million more to these projects. Buterin donated 50 trillion SHIB tokens to the project in May 2022. He also added a further $10 million from his own funds.
The Project
Crypto Relief is a project that was started by Buterin and Nailwal to provide long-term strategic funding for healthcare donations in India. Buterin acknowledged that Covid is still a global problem along with future pandemics. Thus, work in India continues to be a key part of the solution. Along with this, there also needs to be an integrated global approach.
The Approach
Buterin has pledged a commitment to “insist on maximal viable open-source for anything we fund.” This means that in order to achieve public health solutions, they will only fund solutions that depend not on radical behavior change, but on medical and infrastructure work. These can be behind-the-scenes, but also need to be transparent and open to public scrutiny.
Crypto is being used for donations for a wide array of causes and projects. These range from relief efforts in war-torn Ukraine to Turkish earthquake emergency donations to support Canadian truckers. The donation by Buterin and Nailwal is a rare good news story in a world that is still grappling with the pandemic. Their commitment to long-term strategic funding for healthcare donations in India is commendable and could serve as an example for others to follow.