Mira Crypto Fundraising

Siqi Chen shares how a simple fundraising effort for his daughter's rare tumor condition unexpectedly exploded in the crypto world.

"Christmas I was going to Japan to ski with friends and family. I had a plan to start a GoFundMe for the Hankison lab at the University of Colorado. We were donating money to them because they're the only lab in North America that researches this particular tumor called craniopharyngioma, and they found the treatment we're on.

I tweeted a thread with the GoFundMe link and we ended up raising about a quarter million dollars, which was the biggest donation to that lab. Then people started asking if they could donate crypto. I posted my Ethereum address, and others asked for a Solana address. I didn't have one, so the next day when I landed, I created my first Solana wallet and tweeted the address.

An hour later, I looked at my wallet and it said $400,000 when it was zero an hour before. Someone had created a coin called 'Mira' on pump.fund, a platform where you can create a coin in literally thirty seconds. The market cap peaked around $60 million, and I owned about 30% of it.

I immediately said every dollar in my wallet would go to charity - specifically to the research lab. I started selling a thousand dollars every ten minutes to be transparent. We ended up raising about $1.4 million total between the GoFundMe and crypto donations.

What was interesting is that after this happened, a bunch of rare disease organizations started reaching out to me saying, 'Wow, this happened to you, how do we get in on this?' The average annual budget for one of these organizations is only about $100,000-$150,000, so this was more money than the community had ever seen."