Paxful, a peer-to-peer crypto exchange, has completed its second school in Rwanda using entirely Bitcoin donations through the #BuiltWithBitcoin campaign. The new school is a primary school for students up to age 14, with Paxful intending to provide students with smartphones and tablets, and the curriculum to be a return to the basic liberal arts notion of trivium et quadrivium or classical education.
Both teachers and students will have blockchain and Bitcoin information at the heart of their education, potentially preparing students for a thriving future in Rwanda which is being fomented by the government’s willingness to embrace new technologies. Students will learn how to transact in Bitcoin and even exchange it for local currency, an important real-world lesson they can take home to their parents. Paxful is, of course, a realistic method of safely doing so, one of many.
The school has a total of 6 classrooms with a teacher for each, running water and electricity, a cafeteria, and all the other modern things that Western students take for granted. In a press release, Paxful CEO Ray Youseff said:
“We encourage the cryptocurrency sector to contribute more to humanitarian projects. The #BuiltWithBitcoin initiative is an example of bitcoin being used as more than a speculative tool but a testament to the usefulness of cryptocurrency. To date, we have built two schools – a nursery, and a primary school in Rwanda, Africa- and provided scholarships to Afghan refugees, and plan to continue these philanthropic ventures.”
The company announced in July a partnership with ZamZam Water to ensure that the school had the vital resource which is far from a guarantee at all in that part of the world.
In total, Paxful aims to build 100 schools across the country, and there’s no saying the project has to stop there. They raise donations through their own platform and through social media awareness, and convert the donations into schools. The power of the blockchain is leveraged, as Ray Youseff says in the above video: “Bitcoin people don’t wait around. Cryptocurrency is fast.”
And they are doing a lot with a little. The Bitcoin address (donations can be made in other major cryptos as well) used for donations, 3Q5CESP85hhXTLSy2HDbSyNchb5Bi8D7ku, had received just 15 BTC at time of writing. While it’s not nothing, it demonstrates the amount of good that a relatively small amount of money can do in a place like Rwanda, and potentially the powerful impact that blockchain will play as Rwandan society increasingly adapts to it.
As for Paxful, they remain one of the top peer-to-peer crypto marketplaces, working hard to unseat veteran LocalBitcoins.
Featured Image from Shutterstock
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