In a rare good news story this week, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revealed that, along with Polygon’s Sandeep Nailwal, he has pledged another $100 million for Covid relief.
On June 9, Buterin said he and Sandeep “discussed and jointly concluded these and other projects are high-impact and need follow-through grants.”
“Hence we decided to put $100 million more to these projects.”
Last year, the pair donated a similar amount through the community-driven Crypto Relief project.
Last year @CryptoRelief_ led by @sandeepnailwal allocated $100m to Covid research projects I wanted to fund
Sandeep and I discussed and jointly concluded these and other projects are high-impact and need follow through grants. Hence we decided to put $100m more to these projects
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) June 8, 2023
He said that Crypto Relief has put in $90 million USDC from his original SHIB donation, and he is adding a further $10 million from his own funds. Vitalik donated 50 trillion SHIB tokens to the project in May 2022.
Crypto Relief is a project started by Buterin and Nailwal to provide long-term strategic funding for healthcare donations in India.
Buterin acknowledged that Covid was still a global problem along with future pandemics. “Work in India continues to be a key part of the solution,” he said before adding that we also need an integrated global approach.
In order to achieve public health solutions, Buterin has pledged a commitment to “insist on maximal viable open-source for anything we fund.”
He added that another focus is on “solutions that depend not on radical behavior change, but on medical and infrastructure work.” They can be behind-the-scenes, but also need to be transparent and open to public scrutiny, he added.
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.
