We have been supporting since 2019. UNICEF’s Crypto Fund Contributing repeatedly, we The same goes for our most recent donation.. Today I’d like to share the story of the journey we’ve been on together, recognize the achievements of our partnership, and talk more about what’s next.
Why and How We Started
in Previous blog postI explained how emerging economies represent a huge opportunity for Ethereum and talked about the importance of asking yourself: “Who benefits the most from Ethereum?”
People living in emerging economies represent billions of the next generation of Ethereum users and developers. So the next question should be: “How do we get to the next billion?”
The Ethereum project began as a small group with a shared mission, and today the project has attracted hundreds of thousands of like-minded developers and researchers. Although these same thoughts were the force that united the community, we must acknowledge that they also created a natural barrier to entry for those who were not connected to anyone in the community. Because of this, I have always known that the Ethereum community lacks the true diversity needed to maximize the true potential of the technology and reach the next billion.
Around the end of 2018, UNICEF Ventures (currently giga project, which we also support). To be honest, before his first meeting, I had doubts about whether EF would fit in well with the UN team. I felt like they were a very traditional, large organization that did things the traditional way. But Chris shared a list of some goals he wanted to achieve using blockchain technology, and it blew my mind.
He and his team understood the importance of public blockchains and the pros and cons of various protocols. It was a moment when both groups felt confident that there was an opportunity for an impactful partnership. UNICEF has networks and resources that we do not have, including ongoing activities in more than 190 countries and cooperation with various stakeholders such as NGOs, corporations, startups, and governments. They were also looking for new ways to change internally and embrace innovation. This is how our collaboration began, and from there we started supporting the UNICEF CryptoFund. Announcement and release At Devcon 5, October 2019.
Chris Fabian and I attended Devcon 5 for Halloween. The UNICEF Ventures team spent a sleepless night coordinating with headquarters to launch the Crypto Fund.
UNICEF Cryptocurrency Fund
Through our collaboration, it was natural for EF to become a founding donor to the UNICEF CryptoFund. CryptoFund is the first means of receiving, holding and spending cryptocurrencies in the entire UN ecosystem (and possibly the large public sector), and invests in supporting technology startups in developing countries to improve the lives of children. . These startups accept tokens and use them without converting them to fiat currency, within the goal of developing open-source digital public goods. To date, 2,527 ETH and 8 BTC have been donated, and 18 investments have been made.
At the same time, CryptoFund is trying to address the key challenges of transparency and accountability for organizations like UNICEF. Traditionally, donors and other stakeholders do not have access to a real-time, tamper-evident view of how a charity spends their money. For CryptoFund, all transactions performed by CryptoFund can be viewed at: Website There is a corresponding link in the blockchain explorer with immutable transaction details.
You can see EF’s most recent donations in the image above. It was first received by UNICEF France and then delivered to UNICEF headquarters.
The CryptoFund website is operated by: juniperis a set of open source tools developed by UNICEF Ventures to help manage digital assets. Any public sector organization looking to leverage tokens in a user-friendly and transparent way can experiment with Juniper today.
Many of the 18 startups that received CryptoFund investment are also using blockchain-based technologies in their products, and we will continue to support them through workshops and connect them with great talent and projects in the Ethereum ecosystem. You can learn more about startups developing open source digital public goods. here.
It cannot be overemphasized how impactful this project has been not only for the humanitarian sector and governments, but for the entire world. This has raised awareness and shown the public how it is possible for large, established international organizations to adopt public blockchains in an efficient and transparent manner. I’ve heard a lot of positive feedback. I sincerely hope that other traditional organizations, such as UNICEF, will also feel more confident in leveraging these public goods.
What are your future plans?
We continue to support CryptoFund and its portfolio companies developing digital public goods in emerging economies, while also advancing EF’s collaboration with UNICEF. through something new EF Fellowship Program, we are supporting two exciting developments: An EF Fellow representing a CryptoFund portfolio company is working with many countries and local governments in Latin America to use blockchain for digital identity and verifiable credentials. Another EF Fellow is exploring the intersection of internet connectivity and blockchain in collaboration with Giga, a joint initiative of UNICEF and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) that aims to bring internet to every school in the world.
We are excited to share more about their work in the coming months and look forward to expanding our reach to the next billion people through our continued partnership with UNICEF. In the meantime, you can find the content on Twitter. UNICEF Innovation (manages CryptoFund); UNICEF France (The first national committee to use cryptocurrency) giga.
Lastly, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to Sunita Grote, Head of UNICEF Venture Fund, and Christina Rose Lomazzo, Head of Blockchain at UNICEF (as well as Mehran Hydary, Cecilia Chapiro, and others who have joined us on the journey). Thank you to Chris Fabian for driving this important step together.