Young women coders in Afghanistan are getting a chance to use ethereum's cryptocurrency.
Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, Code to Inspire (CTI), a non-profit for teaching women in Afghanistan to write code, has partnered with the Bounties Network to allow students to accept ether (ETH) for fixing vulnerabilities for businesses or projects posting bounties. And according to Fereshteh Forough, the founder of CTI, the women have already begun earning the second largest cryptocurrency by total value.
The partnership was first inked in May, and once the women were set up with MetaMask accounts and software wallets, they began earning between $10 and $80 per bounty (depending on the project) they completed, Forough said.
While Forough didn't expand on how much ether altogether has been collected by the women, this isn't her first foray into facilitating crypto payments to remote workers in Afghanistan.
In 2014, Forough collaborated with fellow Afghan entrepreneur Roya Mahboob to offer Afghan women the ability to earn bitcoin by blogging. But the program ran into roadblocks since there wasn't a local cryptocurrency exchange to provide liquidity (cash for crypto) and most of the bloggers didn't have bank accounts anyway, whereby they could get a global exchange to transfer the converted crypto into.
"The challenge was how to exchange [bitcoin] to the local fiat currency," Forough told CoinDesk.
At the time, Forough and other CTI representatives would accept the women's cryptocurrency and give them cash in return, but this process had its drawbacks.
Forough continued:
"Even now, when they are saving crypto in any form, there is still the same challenges of how we can exchange them with the local currency or dollars."
Korea University is teaming up with the South Korean subsidiary of crypto exchange Huobi for “industry-academia” cooperation in the field of blockchain development, Seoul Daily reports, June 12.
The agreement between one of South Korea’s most prestigious universities and Huobi Korea seeks to bridge academic research of the innovative technology with products useful for the industry.
According to Seoul Daily, the head of Korea University’s Cryptography Center at the Graduate School of Information Security Professor Kim Hyung-jung said they hoped “to be able to conduct empirical research not only on [the] academic aspects of blockchains, but also on realistic applications through cooperation with Huobi Korea."
Huobi Korea’s CEO reportedly sees the partnership as a means to “expand the base of domestic blockchain technology research and technical education,” while also admitting that they “have been promoting this industry-university cooperation in order to be reborn as a technology company."
Huobi was initially founded in Beijing in 2013, though it is now headquartered in Singapore, with branches in the US, Japan, Hong Kong, and China. The new South Korean subsidiary was opened on March 30. Currently, the Huobi Pro global exchange ranks third worldwide in terms of trading volume, according to Coinmarketcap.
