Ethereum’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin and Balaji Srinivasan, Coinbase’s former CTO and a board partner at Andreessen Horowitz, have chipped in to India’s COVID-19 Relief fund after a second wave of the pandemic hit the country. Sandeep Nailwal, an Indian tech founder behind the Polygon network created the fund asking the global crypto community to help India.
He provided a Gnosis Safe multisig address for anyone to make their contributions in ERC-20 tokens or ETH. Nailwal then urged well-wishers to reach out to him if they needed more information or help, especially in cases of regulatory filings.
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Following Nailwal’s tweet stream, Srinivasan donated £36,010 in ETH and called on other leading industry players to do the same. In response, Buterin transferred 100 ETH and 100 MKR to the address. His donation was worth more than £432,100.
Fighting COVID-19 the crypto way
After Buterin’s generous contribution Srinivasan promised that he would contribute up to $71,980 more in batches of £36 for every retweet of his appeal for people to come together and support India. Thanking Srinivasan for his unrelenting efforts in this campaign, Nailwal said that he was trying to expand the reach of the fund to include other cryptocurrencies. He then provided additional addresses for crypto enthusiasts to contribute through Bitcoin (BTC), Dogecoin (DOGE), and Tron (TRX).
However, in Nailwal’s well-orchestrated war against COVID-19 stands one significant pain point. The Indian government is planning to introduce regulations that will ban private cryptocurrencies. As such, it remains unclear whether the government will accept the contributions or not, despite the events on the ground.
India recorded 349,691 new COVID-19 cases yesterday. Reportedly, this is the highest number of new cases that a single country has registered thus far. The country also had 2,767 deaths yesterday, also the highest that one country has recorded since the onset of the pandemic.
