Sean Corey Carter aka Jay-Z grew up in the Marcy Houses in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. On Thursday, the rapper announced that he and The Block CEO Jack Dorsey are giving back their childhood home. Bitcoin Academy, a program to teach financial literacy.
Bitcoin Academy will include a series of online and in-person classes starting later this month, including “What is money?” and “What is Blockchain?”
The event open to anyone at Marcy House will also include a “crypto kids’ camp” and will provide participants with a mobile hotspot and a nominal amount of bitcoin for practical learning.
Instruction will be provided two evenings per week until early September, and students will receive dinner. The Block and Jay-Z’s charity staff, the Shawn Carter Foundation, will help provide grassroots instruction.
Jay-Z and Dorsey announced the program, which will begin at Mercy House, but could be expanded to other neighborhoods Thursday morning.
Classes will be taught through an educational group, Crypto Blockchain Plug, and Black Bitcoin Billionaires, a group that seeks to introduce Black people to bitcoin and has received grants from Block in the past.
Jay-Z, Dorsey collaborate again
This is not the first collaboration between Jay-Z and Dorsey, who is also the former CEO of Twitter, where he promoted a bitcoin and crypto-based future.
In 2021, Dorsey’s Block (then known as Square) acquired the rapper’s streaming music service called Tidal, which the pair proposed to use as a vehicle for NFT distribution. Is.
Dorsey and Jay-Z, who are also investors in blockchain startups like Alchemy, launched an endowment in 2021 to develop bitcoin in Africa and India as well.
Dorsey is funding the new Bitcoin Academy out of his own pocket (as is Jay-Z) but has also spearheaded crypto-related charitable efforts across the block, with $5 backed by revenue from interest earned on the company’s corporate bitcoin holdings. million fund.
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