This App Tracks the Impact of Your Donation to Combat Coronavirus
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Until recently, Thomas Bohner was following all the familiar coronavirus procedures: work from home, social distance, worry about everything. Then, one night over after-work online drinks a couple of weeks ago, he started brainstorming with his team about how to raise money for the coronavirus support effort.
Bohner’s team at IntellectEU, a New York software startup, had the idea of a crowdfunding application for charity. They divided tasks among themselves and hacked it together in fewer than 10 days.
The result is the #SpreadLoveNotCorona web app, which digitally replicates the spreading of a virus. But instead of spreading illness, it scales its impact by encouraging donations to the U.N.’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for the World Health Organization. Donations are recorded and their impact tracked using blockchain technology.
“As a blockchain-focused company, we wanted to prove how quickly you can develop and deploy a blockchain-based application (in this case Corda),” Thomas Bohner, vice president of IntellectEU, told CoinDesk in an email.
The idea is fairly straightforward. You sign up to donate, create a username and then donate before sharing a link with others to encourage them to do the same. You can click here to view a full mock-up of the app, and click through it.
The giving started with “patient zero;” with “every infection, the tree branches out and becomes wider and deeper. In the context of our application this means more donations to charity, so the more the merrier,” writes Robbert Coeckelbergh in a Medium post about the app’s technological construct.