Vitalik Buterin donates USDC to fight Covid-19

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has decided to donate as much as $4 million in USD Coin (USDC) stablecoin to the University of New South Wales (UNSW), to help in the development of a technology to track the Covid-19 pandemic and thus prevent contagions.

Vitalik Buterin contributes to the fight against Covid-19

Already on 5 May, Vitalik had published a post on Twitter in which his concern about Covid-19 and in particular about the symptoms in the long term was made clear.

@patientled research into the details of Long Covid symptoms:https://t.co/a2v6CeE7Sn

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) May 5, 2022

The association to which Buterin donated is called the Balvi Filantropic Fund, which already collaborates with another crypto project, the memecoin Shiba Inu (SHIB), and with Crypto Relief, a cryptocurrency donation fund set up by Sandeep Nailwal in April 2021.

These funds donated by Vitalik will support the creation of the Shiba Inu Open-Source Intelligence (OISNT) project, a tool that uses artificial intelligence and open source data to warn of a pandemic outbreak.

The tool was created by the Kirby Institute and biosecurity professor Raina MacIntyre to scan the data found online in social media, newspapers and so on to see if there are signs of an increased likelihood of a pandemic outbreak.

In fact, in general, it seems that the tool is not only aimed at defeating the Covid-19 pandemic but in general all possible future cases of other diseases.

In this regard, Vitalik Buterin explained:

“Open analysis of public data is an excellent alternative to more intrusive forms of monitoring, which are also often only available to governments and other high bidders but closed to the public. By contrast, an open-source and open-access approach that allows researchers, including members of the public, to work collaboratively across the world can be more easily improved and scaled to detect new pandemics wherever they begin”.

On 13 May, Buterin had also donated $1 billion in Shina Inu to the same Crypto Relief fund, also to fight Covid-19.