It's time for a round up of #MerryMerkle 2018 - the first week.
Donations
- So far, we have raised R32065.25 - enough to sponsor one child for a full year at African Angels.
- Blockgeeks have agreed to provide free subscriptions to their courses for all the computers in the Community Hub in Cintsa East (which serves approximately 5000 people).
- Bounties.network and Consensys have sent a children's book called "Trust Fruit" to be read with the kids next week.
- Brescia House, a school in Johannesburg, has agreed to donate 10 iPads to African Angels.
- Status donated an amount of ETH to match the sales at the SuperRare Art Gallery during CryptoLife and DevCon4.
- ChainSafe generously donated 5 ETH.
- Mariano Conti and the Maker team helped improve the leaderboard and add support for their ETH/USD oracle. All the code is open source, so anyone can reuse it next year.
Next Up
10 volunteers are arriving in Cintsa East, South Africa tomorrow or Monday morning. We will be building a new high school class for the school next year, meeting the children and reading with them. It's really exciting, and we hope that the week of the 10-17th will see an increase in donations to match our on-the-ground efforts.
Unfortunately, @MerkleMerry has been suspended and Twitter isn't responding to our appeals, so we need YOUR help! Please spread the word to all your friends, use the #MerryMerkle hashtag liberally in your own social posts, and join us in the #merrymerkle chat in Status for a censorship-free experience. With no ability to share posts, it's critical we activate the crypto word-of-mouth network, so please help us do that!
You really can make a difference on this front - @angels_african is the school's Twitter, so send them some digital love!
Conclusion
I know that the markets aren't really helping make anyone feel generous right now, but I think this actually provides people with an opportunity for meaningful giving. The people to whom I hope this sort of effort appeals likely didn't get into crypto to get wealthy. Rather, they became interested and started building stuff because of the possibilities networks like Ethereum offer to redefine the concept of wealth.
This is both a technical and social problem and I appeal to you to take part in social and cultural projects like #MerryMerkle to make sure that we create humane traditions capable of using powerful technologies responsibly.
