Gitcoin’s UNICEF Grants Round Raises Over $100,000 Contributions
More than 15,500 individuals contributed 67.5 ETH and $15,000 in DAI in the recently concluded United Nations Childrens Fund Office of Innovation alpha round set up in partnership with Gitcoin to test decentralised grants protocol, the former said while announcing the result of the grant round.
UNICEF’s alpha round is the first in the series of the grants rounds lined up by Gitcoin to test its ability to successfully launch a decentralised grants protocol after about four years of operating a centralised grants platform.
The grant round which ran in December 2022 had 10 projects operating in the area of financial inclusion and literacy, agriculture, education and public health invited to participate. Some of the projects have won hackathons while others are recipients of investments from top firms.
📣 📣 The results are in for our first Alpha Round with @UNICEFinnovate 👀
Read our latest article by @azeemk_ on how the ten amazing grantees did during this historic round:https://t.co/dh12R7hIpj pic.twitter.com/npYYCh8oCj
— Gitcoin (🤖, 💚) (@gitcoin) January 24, 2023
The projects are Sta Twig, Somleng, XCapit, Kotani Pay, Pixframe Studios, Simple Map, Treejer Protol, Bioverse Labs, Rahat and AEDES. Sta Twig led the other projects in the number of contributors, total contributions and match amounts with 8,807, $18,901.16 and $11,634.68 respectively.
On top of the 50 ETH committed to the matching pool by UNICEF’s Office of Innovation, we had over 15,500 individual donors who contributed over 67.5 ETH and close to $15,000 in DAI. Our fantastic community donated almost an additional $100k on top of the 50 ETH we began with, wrote Azeem Khan, Gitcoin’s Fundraising and Partnerships Lead.
The success of the UNICEF grant round does not mean the decentralised grants protocol is perfect for use. It is still being tested and Khan said that every round would help Gitcoin move close to getting the protocol ready.
Photo credit: Gitcoin
According to Khan: The goal is to get this to the point that it is simple and easy to use for anyone on the internet instead of only being a crypto-native product. And while we may not be there yet, these Alpha Rounds are the steps we need to arrive at that destination.
This is not the first time the global humanitarian organisation would partner with cryptocurrency firms. In 2019, UNICEF announced it would receive and disburse donations of Bitcoin and Ether cryptocurrencies through its UNICEF Cryptocurrency fund to “fund open source technology benefiting children and young people around the world”. It received its first cryptocurrency from the Ethereum Foundation.
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