Our all-time largest donation, and major crypto support from Vitalik Buterin

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I’m thrilled to announce two major donations to MIRI!

 

First, a long-time supporter has given MIRI by far our largest donation ever: $2.5 million per year over the next four years, and an additional ~$5.6 million in 2025.

This anonymous donation comes from a cryptocurrency investor who previously donated $1.01M in ETH to MIRI in 2017. Their amazingly generous new donation comes in the form of 3001 MKR, governance tokens used in MakerDAO, a stablecoin project on the Ethereum blockchain. MIRI liquidated the donated MKR for $15,592,829 after receiving it. With this donation, the anonymous donor becomes our largest all-time supporter.

This donation is subject to a time restriction whereby MIRI can spend a maximum of $2.5M of the gift in each of the next four calendar years, 2021–2024. The remaining $5,592,829 becomes available in 2025.

 

Second, in other amazing news, the inventor and co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, yesterday gave us a surprise donation of 1050 ETH, worth $4,378,159.

This is the third-largest contribution to MIRI’s research program to date, after Open Philanthropy’s ~$7.7M grant in 2020 and the anonymous donation above.

Vitalik has previously donated over $1M to MIRI, including major support in our 2017 fundraiser.

 

We’re beyond grateful for these two unprecedented individual gifts! Both donors have our heartfelt thanks.

 

April 2021 Newsletter

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March 2021 Newsletter

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February 2021 Newsletter

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January 2021 Newsletter

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December 2020 Newsletter

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2020 Updates and Strategy

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MIRI’s 2020 has been a year of experimentation and adjustment. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we largely moved our operations to more rural areas in March, and shifted to a greater emphasis on remote work. We took the opportunity to try new work set-ups and approaches to research, and have been largely happy with the results.

At the same time, 2020 saw limited progress in the research MIRI’s leadership had previously been most excited about: the new research directions we started in 2017. Given our slow progress to date, we are considering a number of possible changes to our strategy, and MIRI’s research leadership is shifting much of their focus toward searching for more promising paths.

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November 2020 Newsletter

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