With 16 major cities stops from New York to California, Tour de Crypto has inaugurated its first annual cycling road trip for cryptocurrency awareness. Jason Berlin and Jovel Velasquez set on their bicycle journey on the 14th of September 2018 to help the vastly growing crypto community to be recognized across the world.

The goal of the bicycle journey is to raise 1 Million USD from crypto and USD through donations for Houston Area Women’s Center (HAWC), a nonprofit organization working to end domestic and sexual violence. The organization also provide services like shelter, counselling, education and advocacy. The donations will go to wallets that are maintained by HAWC, whereas the tour itself will not be getting any sort of donations.

The Details

Along their bicycle journey across the US, Jason and Jovel are filmed for their daily recorded live feeds for social media. The live feeds consist of their interactions and talks with general public and different organizations as they educate them on the benefits and advantages of adopting cryptocurrency. Organizations, more specifically nonprofit organizations are the focus of their discussions as Jason and Joel educate them to incorporate cryptocurrencies according to their use cases.

The documentaries are being shared with different video distribution platforms to help and support the crypto community across the world. Jason and Joel are accompanied by video and audio crews along with a driver, who’ll film them. The schedule of the journey is given below.

I talked to Blake Rizzo, charity affairs advisor of Tour de Crypto as he gave us his exclusive insight about the challenges riders are facing and what will be next for Tour de Crypto.

Are the events taking place in different cities open to public?

Generally what we are doing in each city are meet and greets and they are open to public. The event we did in DC was with Bruce Porter whereas the Atlanta one had a pretty decent turnout. For Houston event, we sent invites to our partners as well as people who are supportive of cryptocurrency.

Please tell us about the status of crypto donations that are coming in from sponsors and general public since HAWC is maintaining the mobile wallet.

Blake: Ronnie Moas is our lead sponsor and personally donating money. He brought the cheque for Tour de Crypto in our Houston meet and greet on October the 14th, furthermore, World Crypto Con has pledged 5% of their ticket sales. The donations are coming in from different communities, we have a guy at HAWC who checks the mobile wallet for us and we had a lot of attraction from our DC event but the Houston event was really big because it created a significant interest as HAWC executives and a few podcast groups covered it pretty well.

As Crypto Con has pledged 5% of their ticket sales, is there anything else they’re doing for Tour de Crypto?

Well we estimated minimum 5% of Crypto Con ticket sales to be around $100,000 and probably be more than $200,000. They have what they call ‘crypto kindness’ by which every year they support a charity and this year we are the focus as they’ve given us a booth and tickets to the event so that we can have some HAWC executives at the event, furthermore, they are supporting us on social media by sharing our posts and stuff. They are the one who are setting us up with some major and top-notch crypto influencers who have hundreds and thousands of followers on social media and they are going above and beyond in helping us spread the message. They will also give us stage time at World Crypto Con as Ronnie Moas will talk around 10-15 minutes along with the riders Jason and Jovel. I’m hoping that this will be the relationship that’ll continue in the future, we haven’t talked about it but we would love to partner with them every year because this is a great way to spread the message and our goal is to be there at the event on time.

Will Tour de Crypto and HAWC be partnering in the future as well?

Certainly we will continue to support and help HAWC but our goal is to take on-board more charitable organizations every year. Since this is our first year it was hard to find a good charitable organization and we won’t mind taking on-board several charitable organizations for our next Tour de Crypto. HAWC was very receptive when we reached out plus they are a superior charity and got super ratings on charity navigator but we do like to spread our network to as many charities as we can and organize more journeys every year. People have also asked us to go to overseas charities as well so for now we are gonna let the cards fall as they may and see how big we can make this thing.

Once this journey ends, how you see the future for Tour de Crypto as it spreads its wings and discover new horizons?

We will definitely do one major event every year but then we would love to do some smaller events or races and other things like that once we get this thing going. We are getting a lot of overseas interest too as some people and organizations from Europe and China have reached out to us for some collaboration for next year.

Tell us about the overseas interest in Tour de Crypto since Asia and more specifically East Asia is considered a hub of cryptocurrency.

They’re definitely ahead in cryptocurrency arena from us (United States) so obviously we would love to take Tour de Crypto international. We want to take this year as a use case and a pilot project to show the world that it totally works and since we’re filming the whole journey, we plan to put up a documentary to show people that it works and use that to reach out to other charitable organizations all over the world and get them on-board.

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On 19th of October, the riders got in to a serious bicycle accident and as a result Jason Berlin had to pull out of the journey due to broken heel, however, Jovel managed to continue riding for two despite bruises. BlockPublisher wishes Jason a speedy recovery and all the best for Jovel who is still riding for the greater cause!