UNICEF (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund) has started a new kind of charity drive for Syrian children, asking PC gamers to use their computers to mine Ethereum and donate their earnings.
The two-month long charity campaign that began Feb. 2, dubbed Game Chaingers, is aimed at gamers that use high level graphics cards capable of cryptocurrency mining, turning the cards into “humanitarian tool[s]:”
“Today, humanitarian collections often solicit the same people with the same methods, but cryptocurrencies and their revolutionary approach are an opportunity to raise funds differently. Have you heard of Bitcoin? The Ethereum is the same, except that you can more easily ‘mine’ the Ethereum coins via your computer and that money will go directly into the UNICEF wallet.”
Donations work in the following way: when participating gamers take a break from their computers or go to sleep, they can turn on UNICEF’s Ethereum mining program, thus donating without giving away anything but access to their computer’s processing power.
The website reads:
“Through the use of mining we create an opportunity for those who can not give or have never had the opportunity to do so.”
Game Chaingers’s statistics currently shows a total of 360 contributors, 44 of which are currently active at press time, that have mined almost 900 euros in donations for humanitarian aid for Syrian children.
According to the website’s project info, 8.3 mln children in Syria and bordering countries are in need of vital emergency help. UNICEF will use the donated Ethereum to give these children access to water, education, and health and hygiene services.
This isn’t the first time that UNICEF has thought to mix cryptocurrencies and humanitarian aid.
In January 2017, UNICEF presented “Donercoin” at London Blockchain Week, a Blockchain-based program aimed at creating transparency in global aid by digitizing donations.
More recently, in August 2017, UNICEF Ventures, a branch of the main organization, began testing Ethereum-based smart contracts also to improve the transparency of asset transfers.
Pineapple Fund, a Bitcoin-only charity founded by an anonymous donor, has also made large donations in Bitcoin to a number of philanthropic organizations in the past few months. According to their website, the Fund plans to give out a total of $86 mln to charity.