Christina Lomazzo was hired as the United Nations Children’s Fund’s first head of blockchain. Now she's leading the Unicef Crypto Fund, a prototype that accepts bitcoin and ether donations and invests them into blockchain startups working with children.
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As the United Nations, which received $15 billion in donations last year, kicks off a new phase of development in which it sees itself as not only dispenser of aid but as a financial innovator, the ability to accept cryptocurrency donations and track exactly how they were spent could pave the way for a new, more transparent agency, leading to more donations.
In February 2016, at around the time her future colleagues at the United Nations finished their first blockchain prototype, Lomazzo entered a “super-seedy,” now-closed, bar in Toronto called the Clocktower Brew Pub and began documenting how bitcoin was evolving. She photographed a bitcoin ATM that was “behind a black curtain, so you felt like you were doing something wrong,” she says, and took what ended up being the first of four photos of the ATM.
In spite of some less than successful work at the Office of Innovation involving virtual reality, Fabian and London School of Economics grad Sunita Grote, 37, took a cue from the resolution and launched the Unicef Venture Fund in February 2016 as a way to fund startups working with open source technology in developing nations.
Perhaps most importantly, the 47-page report called for the creation of an inclusive digital economy and society. The World Bank estimates that as of 2018, 1.7 billion people were excluded from the global banking economy.
Since Unicef isn’t currently able to pay salaries, energy bills or rent in crypto, the fund received a special waiver from the director of finance at Unicef’s private fundraising and partnerships division saying that it would forgo a fee it normally charges to recover its own costs. “We’re going into an era where our top leadership recognizes that Unicef needs to be a financing and financial institution,” says Fabian.
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