Why Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin, Tron's Justin Sun, Balaji Srinivasan Donated To India's Covid Relief

Prominent personalities in the crypto asset space donated a hefty sum to the India Covid relief campaign led by local crypto entrepreneur and Polygon MATIC/USD co-founder Sandeep Nailwal.

What Happened: Justin Sun, the founder of cryptocurrency Tron TRX/USD and CEO of file-sharing protocol development firm Bittorrent BTT/USD, donated 2 million TRX tokens to the fund, equivalent to nearly $230,000 as of press time.

Ethereum ETH/USD co-founder Vitalik Buterin and crypto angel investor and entrepreneur Balaji S. Srinivasan also donated over $600,000 and $50,000 respectively to the fund.

Why It Matters: Nailwal wrote when announcing the campaign on Twitter: "Can't take this sitting down anymore, I am going to run a Covid relief campaign in lieu of what’s going on in India. Need help from the Global crypto community."

The donations come as India reported a record number of Covid-19 cases for the fifth day in a row, as the overall number reaches 17 million.

The country has also imposed another strict lockdown.

What Else: This is not the first time that the crypto asset community bands together for a good cause.

Earlier this month, non-fungible token (NFT) auction platform Drumpfs announced that 97% of the proceeds of the auctions of former US president Trump's 46,694 tokenized tweets would go to charity.

Recently launched cryptocurrency project Elongate pledged $1 million to various charities.

In another example, Fidelity Charitable — the charity arm of financial services giant Fidelity Investments — received over $28 million worth of donations in cryptocurrency in 2020.