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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.
Here’s the @gnosisSafe Multisig address to donate in ETH/ERC20 to this address.
— Sandeep – Polygon(prev Matic Network) (@sandeepnailwal) April 24, 2021
0x68A99f89E475a078645f4BAC491360aFe255Dff1
"If you want", Plz fill this form so we can reach you for more help and specially if needed for regulatory filings.https://t.co/ZzDrBZYC7p
2/n
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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).
With the efforts of @balajis we are trying to increase the reach of this fund
— Sandeep – Polygon(prev Matic Network) (@sandeepnailwal) April 25, 2021
Eth Address to donate: 0x68A99f89E475a078645f4BAC491360aFe255Dff1
BTC :
bc1q220k2449fau0pxu9hfn28q3w4k99ep9hwsa5fa
DOGE :
D6fWVp613N3dyLM6Zoghj3dZaEjbGZ8gpX
Tron :
TSZMcrQzMLdKrgiMPoe2uQMHLeEpkf2j8E
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.