In April 2021, India was being devastated by the second wave of COVID-19. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Oxygen was scarce. Indian-American polkadot.js developer Sandeep Nailwal launched the Crypto COVID-Relief Fund and asked the crypto community to help. Vitalik Buterin saw the appeal and made one of the largest charitable contributions in crypto history: he donated 50 trillion SHIB to the fund, valued at approximately $1 billion at the time of the donation.
The fund had to convert the SHIB to fiat carefully, to avoid crashing the price. Even after slippage, the donation translated into hundreds of millions of dollars in real aid: oxygen concentrators, ICU beds, vaccines, and medical supplies for thousands of hospitals across India. It was the moment crypto philanthropy went from theoretical to monumentally real. A meme coin had funded life-saving infrastructure on the other side of the world.
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