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IOHK will fund Cardano to help the UN reach its sustainable goals

Photo of: Janeth Diamond
by Janeth Diamond

Cardano is out on a mission, and that mission is to create a decentralized financial and social system for the world. But Cardano also knows that it is not possible to achieve the goal single-handedly which is why collaborations are important. Taking this mission forward Cardano recently announced that it was thrilled to announce its joint challenge with the United Nations. It has launched a hackathon challenge that is designed to speed up the progress on fighting hunger, injustice, and climate change. 

International development is important for all nations to progress on fairgrounds and the hackathon challenge aims to give the blockchain community an opportunity to make the necessary impact. Input Output Hong Kong, popularly known as IOHK will provide the necessary expertise in community-focused funding developed with Project Catalyst. The exciting initiative brings in innovation, voting, decentralized funding to Cardano by crowdsourcing development proposal and implementation financing. 

IOHK and UN personnel will utilize the Project Catalyst platform to fund the initiatives that align with the UN’s sustainable development goals. The listed goals were adopted by 193 world leaders in 2015. Taking a close look at the targets we see that each of the 17 targets focuses on ending poverty, hunger, inequality, and injustice and a more pressing concern climate change by 2030.

This collaboration is hopeful of promoting projects that are based on the digitization of finance which will automatically enhance the efficacy and transparency of funding for the UN’s Decade of Action. Engaging with a blockchain solution for this purpose makes sense which is why IOHK has proven to be a good fit to help build a robust way of implementing ideas that address these goals.

All the participants can put in their ideas focused on these 17 goals. IOHK is also luring more participation by giving out a prize fund of ADA worth $10,000. It will also provide continuous support to ensure that the projects are implemented well. All the proposals coming along will go through a panel of judges from IOHK and UN employees. The winners will be selected based on the rubrics of technical wisdom, social impact, financial support as well as the scalability it offers. UN and IOHK will also have advisors who will give the projects and the winning ideas more insights.

All the entries should be open-source and be created for use on the Cardano blockchain, and need not be fully-coded. As a rule, the code should be written in Marlowe which is a domain-specific language developed specifically for financial contracts on Cardano. It is enough that they are inspiring ideas for someone who could be a part of blockchain initiatives. The proposal submission period opens on Saturday and all the entries have to be finalized by October 18th. The winners will be announced on 24th October on the United Nations Day. 

As of now, the initiative is motivating everyone with an interest in using Cardano to participate and achieve sustainability goals. The UN’s Decade of Action deserves your attention right away!

The official rules can be checked here!