Leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance has recently revealed it raised a total of $1.41 million to help flood victims in Japan. The funds were raised by the exchange and the cryptocurrency community.
As CryptoGlobe covered, Binance revealed it was going to donate $1 million to flood victims in Japan, after the country was hit by “record-breaking rain” that left 222 dead, with 21 people still missing. Per Accuweather, this is the deadliest rain-related disaster in Japan since 1982, and the country is now being affected by a heat wave.
Binance’s donation was set to come either in Bitcoin (BTC), Binance Coin (BNB), or the Japanese Yen (JPY). At the time, the cryptocurrency exchange’s CEO, Changpeng Zhao, asked the cryptocurrency community for help.
In a new update, Binance revealed the community raised an additional $410,000 worth of Ether and 30 different ERC-20 tokens. The funds will be donated in a series of rounds, with the first one seeing 50,000,000 JPY (about $443,000) worth of crypto be turned into Bitcoin, and then into JPY to be donated.
$410,000 USD additional was raised in 60 donations in the last 7 days. There are some big hearts out there in crypto! Thank you for your generosity, and effort in making our little Earth a better place.https://t.co/ga30ddMorS pic.twitter.com/864zhQGFkJ
— CZ (not giving crypto away) (@cz_binance) July 18, 2018
Binance itself isn’t in Japan, as it left shortly after receiving a warning from the country’s Financial Services Agency (FSA). As such, it’s going to send the funds to a local partner, so they can reach their destination.
To ensure nothing goes wrong, Binance will send 0.1 BTC to the partner’s address before sending the remaining funds. The partner will convert the funds to JPY, and then send 25 million to two officially registered Non-Profit Organizations (NPOs) that are “actively providing relief to Hiroshima and Okayama prefectures.”
Binance’s post reads:
Through our initial discussions with both NPOs’ leadership, we are confident that this Round 1 Donation will drive recovery efforts in two of the areas hit hardest by the West Japan Flooding.
The cryptocurrency exchange has recently made headlines, as it recently recapped its 4th quarter via a letter on LinkedIn. The exchange burned a total of 2,528,767 BNB, equivalent to about $30 million USD.
The BNB burn every quarter is part of the cryptocurrency exchange’s model, and this quarter saw “the highest number of BNBs” be burned so far. In the letter, the company’s CEO noted that the sheer volume raised in initial coin offerings (ICOs) should be enough to help boost the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
As covered, BNB is a cryptocurrency that’s been bucking the bearish trend, and started being seen by some analysts as a form to hedge against bearish trends in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.
