At the beginning of year 2020 the world is devastated with the corona virus (covid 19), and continuously lambasted across the world that claimed total number of 15,321 people at the time of writing. As the world watch this awful event that taken many lives, the need for personal hygiene and health awareness is on the rise as ever as the WHO declares this outbreak as pandemic.
(Screenshot of worldometers.info/coronavirus March 23, 2020, 1246 GMT.)
And the effect to the world economy is devastating, and crytocurrency ecosystem is not an exemption to this. Bitcoin and Ethereum suffer, and in the fast days BTC has plunge to $ 5,023.50 on March 17, 2020. This is the biggest drop of BTC in seven years. But slowly recovering up until this time.
On the positive note, cyrptocurrency community is not just seating spectator but actively contributing in as much as it could. An example to this the effort of CoreWeave, the largest U.S. miner on the Ethereum blockchain, in which it is diverting miner (GPU) to a research that helps find a coronavirus cure.
But one major factor that cryptocurrency could contribute is that it could help stop the further spreading of the said disease. By using cryptocurrency instead of paper money and metallic coins will help lessen the transmittal of covid 19 because fiat money is known to be vectors of transmissible disease. Evidently, the physical feature of fiat money and the lack of awareness of the handler could further spread the virus. Though, efforts were made to know that cashless transactions could help. With WHO warns that coronavirus could be spread through cash and that people should exercise care when handling potentially infectious banknotes because the virus can survive 24 hours in paper and cardboard.
Still many people are unaware of the alternative ways in making transactions, especially, contact-less or cashless. That is why it is high time for the whole cryptocurrency community to spread the word and thus making people aware that there are other way, which is better, in buying or selling goods and other products.
What we are collectively facing could end soon, but the benefits of using cryptocurrency is evident. Others say that the temporary plunge is a meltdown of cryptocurrency as store of value, but it does not account that there are cryptocurrency that are pegged with USD such DAI, USDT among others. With these coins that are pegged USD, people could easily adopt cryptocurrency.
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Reference
1 https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
4 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24571076
6 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8088067/Coronavirus-spread-cash-warns-WHO.html
7 https://www.livescience.com/how-long-coronavirus-last-surfaces.html
