After record flooding hit the Balkans two weeks ago, two recent graduates from UC Berkeley’s School of Information have launched an effort to raise funds in the form of cryptocurrency to help the relief effort in Serbia.

As Lazar Stojkovic and Mark Brazinski celebrated their May 17 graduation from the School of Information, torrential rains had already begun to fall in cities in southeastern Europe, including Belgrade, Stojkovic’s homeland. A reported three months’ worth of rain fell on the Balkans region in three days, killing more than 40 people. In response, Stojkovic created a website on May 20 to allow visitors to donate through the cryptocurrency Bitcoin to help victims.

Brazinski, who later joined the project, added an option to donate via Dogecoin — a form of online currency developed in December that harnesses the popularity of the Internet doge meme.

Bitcoin, which was first used in 2009, is a digital currency that lets users with an Internet connection make payments through a computer-to-computer network. Because Bitcoin makes its transactions public, the network is more transparent than traditional currency.

“What makes Bitcoin different than something else is … (that) there’s open accounting,” Brazinski said. “So that means all of your debits and credits and everything that’s ever been moved is always recorded.”

Because cryptocurrencies are based online, they do not incur the same costs as donations based in other currencies. The fee associated with converting bitcoins to dollars is about 1 percent through Coinbase, a popular Bitcoin exchange. Fees to exchange euros for dollars, however, can vary widely from one exchange group to another, often reaching 4 or 5 percent, according to Brazinski.

“When it comes to cryptocurrency, you can move them across international borders with a much lesser fee,” Brazinski said. “A lot more is going towards relief efforts and a lot less of third parties getting their hands into it.”

This kind of fundraising campaign taps into a community that wants to show the power of cryptocurrency to do good, according to Brian Bloomer, a master’s candidate in the campus School of Information and founder of the Bitcoin Association of Berkeley. In January, a group raised more than $25,000 worth in dogecoins to send the Jamaican bobsled team to the Winter Olympics. And in March, the Reddit and Dogecoin communities rallied to sponsor NASCAR driver Josh Wise.

In fact, the Serbia fundraising website has raised more funds using dogecoins, Stojkovic said, which Brazinski attributed to the strength of the Dogecoin community.

Overall, the duo have raised $21.53 for UNICEF Serbia as of Tuesday and $35.01 for the Red Cross of Serbia as of Thursday, according to the website.

The region needs more than just immediate funds, however, according to Lazar Supic, a graduate student in the campus’s nuclear engineering department. He said that because the flooding destroyed farms along major rivers, food will be scarce and recovery slow for the next couple of years.

It took just six minutes for the city of Doboj, in Bosnia and Herzegovina — Supic’s native country — to be covered in about 12 feet of water.

Jasmina Vujic, a campus professor of nuclear engineering, said thousands of people swarmed riverbanks to defend cities, struggling to rebuild the levees with sandbags.

In Sabac, where her family lives, the city struggled against the waters for several nights.

“My mother is there, and she could barely move,” Vujic said. “My sister and her family, her daughter just had a baby a week ago, and they were so scared that if they needed to evacuate, they wouldn’t know how.”

The only benefit of the flooding, Supic said, is that it has brought the region closer together.

“If you can say that there is a highlight, it is that people show their humility and hospitality and all of these virtues that make us human beings,” he said.

Contact Katy Abbott at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @katyeabbott.