Polygon enables crypto donations to Nepal’s Disaster Relief Fund

When a glacier collapsed in Nepal on August 26, triggering floods that killed hundreds and devastated entire districts, the crypto industry’s response came in the form of smart contracts instead of just sympathy tweets. Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal launched nepalrelief.org on September 4, creating a verified pipeline for cryptocurrency donations to flow directly into Nepal’s Prime Minister Disaster Relief Fund. The platform had already raised roughly $168,000 by launch day. How the donation pipeline works The system runs on Polygon’s Open Money Stack, which handles the messy plumbing of accepting tokens across multiple blockchains and converting them into something Nepal can actually use. Donors can send funds from various chains, and the infrastructure handles routing, bridging, and conversion into USDC on either Ethereum or Polygon. All donations land in a public USDC wallet (0xA891BB5abf91aBf1796074a1303E75754054f1823D) that anyone can audit on-chain. Every transaction is verifiable, which addresses one of the oldest criticisms of international disaster relief: nobody ever knows where the money actually goes. The conversion from crypto to Nepalese rupees is handled by Enga...