Vitalik Buterin Donates Another $100M to Fund Covid Relief Projects

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

Vitalik Supporting Covid Causes

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.”

Crypto Use for Donations

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.