As a follow-up to our 1000 ETH donation to Freedom of the Press, we’re excited to unveil our full wave of Proof of Heart recipients. These are seven stellar organizations doing remarkable work, and we’re delighted to support them. Independent of the donations, we also plan to collaborate with a number of them on future projects. They are:

USB sticks are actually fairly common in North Korea, with a large percentage of citizens either owning one or knowing someone who owns one. So the Human Rights Foundation came up with Flash Drives for Freedom, an ingenious way of challenging state propaganda by exposing North Korean people to content from the outside world via flash drives sent in through markets and networks on the Chinese border. Content includes South Korean soap operas, Hollywood films, Korean-language versions of Wikipedia, footage of supermarkets and libraries, and interviews with defectors. Forced to live in isolation, this new information can liberate people’s minds. To date, approximately 120,000 flash drives have been donated or pledged. By the end of 2018, an estimated 1.1. million North Koreans will have come into contact with these drives, containing approximately 48 million hours of reading material and 2 million hours of video footage.

We look forward to collaborating with the Human Rights Foundation on this program, along with other initiatives in an ongoing partnership. This includes participation at future Oslo Freedom Forum events, and involvement with their Blockchain and Civil Liberties series of interactive workshops, about blockchain technology and its impact on the civil liberties space.