- The Giving Block is launching the crypto industry’s response to Black Lives Matter with a USD 1 million target charity fund
- WEF will trial a blockchain transparency project in Colombia aiming to crack down on government corruption
Bitcoin may have to delay its rise to USD 10,000 just for now, as yesterday’s rally has taken a step back to settle around USD 9,450 (CoinDesk) today in tight range of trading. The bears will say this is powering down that will revisit old prices below USD 9,000. The bulls will say it’s consolidation. As we have seen for weeks now though, the see-saw market action for Bitcoin looks to be the likelier option.
As the Black Lives Matter protests continue to spread like wildfire throughout the world, igniting all kinds of activism, the blockchain industry does not shy away either. With Bitcoin being touted as a way to do a silent protest against governments, The Giving Block, which has been actively partnering with all kinds of crypto charity over the past few months with campaigns aimed against COVID-19 efforts, has now launched the Crypto for Black Lives donation campaign, in partnership with Gitcoin. Together, they hope to encourage crypto users and holders to donate funds to selected charities, with funds matched through Gitcoin.
The funds will initially support seven different organizations, each working in various sectors fighting for race equality and basic human rights, such as Black Girls Code that looks into education, Nashville Community Bail Fund that hopes to raise bail for deserving people so they can stay out of jail and keep themselves employed, as well as the Justice Committee which fights against police brutality.
The drive was announced following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on 25 May, which has sparked a revolution in human rights activism throughout the world. The Giving Block co-founder Alex Wilson told Decrypt:
“We’ve had donors reach out wanting to support nonprofits addressing the civil rights crisis, so we quickly mobilized to onboard nonprofits in this space so they could accept crypto.”
Wilson said that Gitcoin would now match funds up to USD 25,000 through a community grant but are hoping to bring in more donors to boost the number to at least half a million dollars. The Giving Block and Gitcoin successfully raised over USD 1 million in Bitcoin and other crypto during a previous partnership for the #cryptoCOVID19 campaign and hopes to replicate that success for the #CryptoForBlackLives one now.
Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum (WEF) is also using blockchain, but this time the tech itself instead of outright crypto, to try and make public sector corruption more difficult, with a first transparency project in Colombia. According to WEF blockchain project lead Ashley Lannquist:
“Corruption is a ‘high-potential’ space for blockchain because you really benefit from decentralization; records are very difficult to remove or censor, for instance.”
Lannquist was a co-author of a WEF report that explained in detail how the organization worked with the Office of the Inspector General of Colombia and the Inter-American Development Bank “to investigate, design and trial the use of blockchain technology for corruption-prone government processes”.
The report uncovered how many countries’ public sectors were plagued by dealings made under the table, and that they could be tackled by improving accountability, transparency and enhanced documentation. One technology that could do all of this is blockchain.
And the so-called Transparency Project will first be trialed in Colombia, using a permissionless version of the Ethereum blockchain to test the framework. The report explained:
“The project developed a blockchain-based software proof- of-concept, or PoC, for public procurement that intends to be tested in a live procurement auction in Colombia in 2020.”
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