Cardano’s support for disease research highlights community’s efforts against COVID-19

Cardano’s plan to host the highly-anticipated Shelley launch party might not be possible in Kyoto, Japan due to the increasingly-serious Coronavirus pandemic, but there is no stopping the ecosystem on the development front. However, as the world screams for relief, there still isn’t enough good news to give, especially in light of the varying degrees of lockdown around the world.

Realizing the need to step up at this time of global distress, the crypto-community has come forward to help the masses in their own way. In a recent development, the Cardano Foundation has called on to support the ‘Folding@Home’ project, an initiative that is focused on disease research.

Folding@Home [FAH] aims to form a distributed supercomputer by connecting computers across the globe, in an attempt to develop a drug to kill the deadly virus.

A blog shared by the Cardano Foundation explained that it essentially offers a software program that can be installed onto a person’s personal computer to power scientific research and find a vaccine. The participation in this project is free, apart from minor electricity usage. It further explained,

“As soon as it is running and connected to external systems, it will start using part of your machine’s computational resources. Your computational resources will power efforts to discover the proteins that Covid-19 virus uses to protect its cells. 18The aim of this effort is to create medicines and vaccines to cure and protect from Covid-19 by combining the resources to study this virus’s proteins.”

Right now, there are numerous sites and write-ups dedicated to the pandemic. It’s a tough job to filter the irrelevant and consume the necessary information. Governments and social groups all over the world have tried to do their part to help tackle this global crisis and alleviate the situation. And can the crypto-community stay far behind? Here are some of the initiatives the community has undertaken recently, contributing in their own small ways.

Binance Charity Fund

One of the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchanges, Binance recently revealed that as of 9 March, 6 more batches of medicines were delivered to 130 hospitals for medical teams and command centers to fight the disease via Binance Charity Fund. In a disclosure published recently, the platform revealed the distribution of 2,300 protective suits purchased in Israel to 23 hospitals and medical teams in Wuhan, while 1,000 protective suits purchased in the United Arab Emirates were distributed to 16 hospitals and medical teams as well.

BCF also revealed donating 388 oxygen apparatus to the Guangdong Zhong Nanshan Medical Foundation and distributed 133,000 pairs of PVC gloves and 10,000 pairs of safety goggles.

Homemade sanitizers

Cryptocurrency artist and designer, CryptoGraffiti, has been making hand sanitizers to fight coronavirus using the supplies that are easily available in the drugstore. The Twitter user stated,

“I made more hand sanitizer. If you need one and don’t have access to isopropyl alcohol, DM me and I’ll send you one until I run out. “

Messari’s Covid-19 Tracker

The crypto-data provider Messari has set up a real-time coronavirus tracking website. Recently, Messari CEO Ryan Selkis had revealed being shadow-banned on Twitter for his coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, following which Twitter pages of both Messari and Ryan Selkis went offline for a couple of hours and resumed back service later on 20 March.

DAO, as a fight against Covid-19

“Collab 19 is a DAO that fights COV19,” according to its official website. Collab 19 intends to create a decentralized autonomous organization [DAO] so that people from all over the world can come together to fight COVID-19. According to the website, the Collab19 DAO created 1400 C19 tokens and kept half, while the rest were put on a Uniswap pool.

Every week, Collab19 will cash out 100 of its C19 tokens. Users can purchase these tokens on Uniswap, and while doing so, users can become a part of Collab19 and can vote on how to spend the DAO’s treasury. Tokens are sold on an open market so users can cash them out at any time or hold them as proof of support.

Legal Consultation

Grant Gulovsen of Gulovsen Law Office and Rafael Yakobi of The Crypto Lawyers have also announced teaming up to offer free 20-minute legal consultations to members of the crypto-community, consultations conducted via online video conference.