The Italian Red Cross is reportedly looking for Bitcoin (BTC) donations in order to buy critical medical equipment and supplies. The organization’s first cryptocurrency fundraiser managed to achieve its target within three days after its launch.
On March 12, 2020, Italy’s Red Cross introduced a Bitcoin fundraising campaign in order to generate funds to buy an advanced medical post for pre-triaging coronavirus (COVID-19) cases.
Within only three days, the Red Cross confirmed that it had reached its fundraising goal of $10,710 (€10,000). The agency revealed that it had started purchasing the required materials for establishing a pre-triage facility. After managing to achieve its first fundraising goal so quickly, the charitable organization is planning to continue to raise funds via Bitcoin donations.
The Red Cross is now planning to raise around $26,000 in order to buy equipment for emergency operations, including a defibrillator that comes with a special monitor for checking vital signs.
The organization’s new campaign has, at the time of this writing, raised 75.7% of its funding target after collecting 55 different donations. The Red Cross has reportedly used about $20,000 of the money raised to help with Coronavirus prevention efforts. The Dutch Red Cross is also taking donations in Bitcoin.
The global cryptocurrency community has introduced and backed several initiatives that aim to combat the highly contagious Coronavirus outbreak. Folding@Home, a platform that allocates donated computational (computer) power and resources toward medical research efforts, has received support from several different crypto-related projects, such as Tezos.
The developers of Tezos set up a pool of several hundred XTZ tokens for the biggest F@H contributor at the end of the month. Meanwhile, CoreWeave diverted 6,000 GPUs that were being used to mine Ether (ETH) toward the initiative.
Gitcoin, an Ethereum-focused crowdfunding platform, revealed on March 14 that it would be donating around $50,000 in funding toward public health projects which aim to combat the COVID-19 outbreak. Gitcoin is planning to secure at least $100,000 in order to fund various grants.