CareTo Humanitarian Aid Project

For our internal project at Blockchain at Berkeley, I led a team to build a humanitarian aid distribution platform for Greek refugees. The platform was built on top of the Ethereum blockchain and utilized the MERN (MongoDB, Express, React, Node.js) stack. For more information, read through our design doc here.

Problem

Humanitarian aid donations are typically untraceable amongst nonprofit organizations, and there is no legitimate guarantee that all donated funds go towards impacting refugees in need. Additionally, as of the problem period, there were no platforms that supported crypto donations and provided transparency to donors.

Solution

Our solution allows individual donors to donate Ethereum-native stablecoins to a smart contract pool, which then distributes to refugee MetaMask wallets on a bi-monthly basis. Refugees can spend their coins at an approved vendor. Our solution assumed KYC was implemented through government-issued refugee IDs, and that vendors can utilize a third-party application to off-ramp their crypto to fiat.

Responsibilities

As project lead, I led weekly standups with 4 developers and 2 designers. I also developed a business use case for the product and underlying technical implementation (e.g. smart contracts, KYC, off-ramping). In addition, I interviewed a representative from the International Migration Organization in Greece to learn more about day-to-day experiences of immigrant refugees.