The Ethereum Foundation (EF) had contributed a cumulative 2,527 ETH and 8 BTC to UNICEF's CryptoFund as of November 2021, the foundation confirmed in a blog update, adding a new tranche to a partnership that formally launched at Devcon 5 in Osaka in October 2019. The fund is the first financial vehicle in the entire United Nations system authorized to receive, hold, and disburse cryptocurrency without mandatory conversion to US dollars. Its portfolio had grown to back 18 startups at the time of the update across Kenya, India, Nepal, Rwanda, Argentina, Mexico, and Iran, a number that has since continued to grow.

On-chain data tracked through Juniper, UNICEF's open-source portfolio management tool, shows the fund has received approximately 2,130 ETH and 5.01 BTC from all donors combined and has deployed roughly 2,780 ETH and 8 BTC across 52 ETH-denominated investments and 6 BTC-denominated investments. All transactions are publicly verifiable at juniper.unicef.io, giving any observer a live audit trail without relying on UNICEF's own reporting.

The partnership traces back to a conversation at Devcon 2018 in Prague between EF Executive Director Aya Miyaguchi and UNICEF Ventures co-founder Christopher Fabian. Miyaguchi has been direct about the institutional logic behind the choice of partner. "I think I made the decision to work with UNICEF. Just because of the name of UNICEF, of course it strategically helps, but at the same time it had to be the right team because we're not gonna be the one to drive in a ship inside the organization," she said in a crypto.news interview. Fabian, for his part, has noted how persistent misconceptions about blockchain technology have slowed institutional adoption. "All of these misunderstandings about what the thing is made it take a lot longer than it should have, and I think they still stop governments from adopting certain types of blockchains," he said.

Getting any UN body to hold cryptocurrency natively required significant legal and compliance work. Traditional UN fund structures require donated assets to be converted to USD on receipt, which eliminates the possibility of crypto-denominated disbursements and adds foreign exchange friction for cross-border transfers. The CryptoFund's structure sidesteps this by holding ETH and BTC directly, which is particularly relevant for investee startups in countries with volatile currencies or thin banking infrastructure. Seed funding runs up to $100,000 per company in ETH or BTC; growth-stage companies can receive up to $400,000. The partnership also encompassed an EF Fellowship component: two fellows were embedded directly in UNICEF initiatives, one working on digital identity and verifiable credentials with Latin American governments, and one focused on the Giga school connectivity program.

The regional concentration of applicants reflects where these tools have the most practical utility. Africa accounted for roughly 46% of the 450-plus applications received for the 2021 blockchain cohort, drawn from 77 countries. South Asia contributed around 18%. Less than half of Sub-Saharan African adults held a bank account as of 2021, according to World Economic Forum data, but mobile phone penetration is high. Several portfolio companies are built around that gap: Kotani Pay in Kenya routes crypto remittances through feature phones using USSD (a text-based protocol that works on basic handsets without internet), while Leaf Global Fintech in Rwanda built a virtual banking service for refugees enabling cross-border asset transfers, serving approximately 7,000 refugees across three African countries before its acquisition by IDT Corporation. In Nepal, Rumsan Associates developed Rahat, a blockchain-based digital cash and voucher system designed for emergency relief contexts where conventional banking cannot reach displaced populations.

Rwanda also served as the test site for a Giga initiative that grew directly out of the EF-UNICEF partnership. The EF Fellowship placed one fellow specifically in the Giga connectivity research track, and the foundation's subsequent validator node donation was made through the same partnership infrastructure. The foundation donated 32 ETH, worth approximately $43,000 at the time, to run an Ethereum validator node for Giga, a school connectivity program run jointly by UNICEF and the International Telecommunication Union. Staking rewards generated by that node were periodically withdrawn and converted to fiat to pay internet service provider bills. The pilot connected 63 schools in Rwanda and cut the per-megabit internet price by roughly 55%, from around $20 down to between $9 and $14. "The staking pilot in Rwanda gave us a real glimpse into the future of development finance. It is incredible to see how a single crypto donation can support schools," said Lieke van de Wiel, UNICEF Rwanda Representative. The Government of Rwanda subsequently took over the ISP contracts, indicating that the model passed state-level scrutiny.

The infrastructure being built around the CryptoFund is increasingly open-source. Juniper, the portfolio tracking tool, is available on GitHub at github.com/unicef/juniper-portfolio and is intended for use by any public-sector or humanitarian organization needing transparent on-chain asset management. In 2025, according to an announcement distributed through Chainwire, Giga adopted Lido Impact Staking to scale the Rwanda model, allowing donors to contribute only the yield on staked ETH while preserving their principal. Miyaguchi has been explicit about the intended signal from efforts like these: "Cryptocurrency is too often seen as a means for investment, but as you know, Ethereum is capable of so much more than that." The CryptoFund portfolio, with its verifiable on-chain transactions and real-world deployments in underbanked markets, represents one of the most verifiable examples of that proposition in practice.