UNICEF Guarantees Zero Fiat-Conversion for Your Crypto Donations

United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) has become the first UN agency to receive, hold and disburse aid in crypto.

While the phrase ‘accepting cryptocurrency’ has become code for merely allowing payments or donations to be made in crypto while receiving dollars or other fiat currencies, contributions made to UNICEF will be held as crypto and distributed to beneficiaries without any conversion. This has been made possible through the establishment of the UNICEF cryptocurrency fund.

UNICEF Aiding future leaders with crypto

Initially, UNICEF will use the crypto donations to fund open source technology projects. These initiatives are meant to benefit children and young people across the globe.

The Ethereum Foundation is expected to make the first contribution to the fund. This donation will go to three grantees chosen by the UNICEF Innovation Fund. The three grantees are Atix Labs, Prescrypto and Utopixar.

A projected coordinated by GIGA, which aims to ‘connect every school to the internet, and every young person to information, opportunity and choice’ will also benefit.

National committees of UN agencies have also been accepting donations in crypto for months now. This has included donating computing resources to UNICEF for the UN agency to use in mining crypto.

Let your computer do the world some good

Last year in April, UNICEF Australia launched a webpage TheHopePage with a view of using the computing resources of visitors to mine Monero. The website, which is still up and running, explicitly seeks the permission of visitors before commencing mining.

The UNICEF Australia’s efforts seemed to borrow from an earlier initiative by UNICEF France. Between February 2nd and March 31st, 2018 UNICEF France had partnered with the BETC advertising agency to seek donations in the form of computing power from gamers. This was specifically to help children trapped in the Syrian conflict. However, in this instance, the processing power of computers possessing graphics cards was used to mine Ethereum and not Monero.

Besides seeking computing power to mine crypto albeit for a limited period, UNICEF France also currently accepts nine cryptocurrencies. The nine are Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, Bitcoin Cash, Dash, Monero, EOS and Stellar.

Last modified (UTC): October 9, 2019 14:26

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