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Last but certainly not least, blockchain can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of foreign aid. Today’s aid distribution systems are fraught with problems - many intermediaries lie between the money you donate and the intended recipient, and each one takes a cut, plus, if the destination doesnt have adequate disbursement infrastructure, there’s no guarantee anyone in need will see any of the money sent. Blockchain can help with this. Foreign aid can be divided into cash and non-cash aid. We’ll talk about non-cash aid first, though they both benefit the same way from implementing blockchain technology. Non-cash aid systems that use blockchain include the United Nations World Food Program, whose refugee camps in Jordan currently distribute crypto-vouchers that can be exchanged by refugees for food and other necessities. For the most part, however, aid disbursement is heading in the direction of cash aid, since it is more versatile and, thanks to blockchain, can now be traced from sender to recipient. The problems of fraud and accountability are more severe for providers of cash aid, since vouchers like UNWFPs aren’t necessarily going to be usable by any intermediaries. Implementing a blockchain and using it to transfer aid allows the sender to see where all of the money goes, and the immutable nature of the blockchain ensures that the transactions on chain have not been altered. Consensys Social Impact’s Project Bifröst goes as far as to cut all unnecessary intermediaries out altogether. Bifröst transfers aid as a stable coin (guaranteed to hold its value), which is to be exchanged for local currency via kiosks in the recipient country. Having only two intermediaries drops the cost of transfer to as low as 1% of the transaction value, significantly lower than any transfer medium today. Disberse, on the other hand, chooses to maintain an intermediary network but instead demands strict accountability by logging each transaction on chain. They exchange the transferred cryptocurrency at local banks. This concludes the specific use case section of this lecture. We’re now going to dive into generalizations that can be made between use cases.