EINSTEINIUM FOUNDATION 2021 ANNUAL LETTER

To the Einsteinium (EMC2) Community,

We write this letter to you in another generation defining year.

Eight years ago, the Einsteinium Foundation was created to focus on championing cryptocurrency at the intersection of global health and scientific philanthropy. Science has always been the main driver of human achievement and a hallmark of a thriving civilization.  With its far-reaching consequences for health, food, transportation, and touching every facet of our life. Our focus is to use a community-driven approach to benefit society through scientific advancement. Our vision is that fully decentralized systems will usher in a new age of human equality and cooperation. One where staying alive and chasing health does not become your only priority, to the detriment of your quality of life.
Viruses like SARS-CoV-2 remind us that, for all our differences, everyone in this world is connected biologically by a microscopic network of germs and particles. We hope the experience we’ve all lived through over the last year will lead to a long-term change in the way people think about global health—and help people in rich countries see that investments in global health benefit not only low-income countries but everyone.  The Einsteinium Foundation will play a role as part of a long term solution. The way we see it, you need a lot of different people and interests coming together in goodwill to benefit all of humanity. A new generation of scientific philanthropy can help facilitate that cooperation and progress. Just as the HIV pandemic was a generation defining viral pandemic, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic reminds us that we are living through history.  

When we wrote our last Annual letter

We were just beginning to understand the global pandemic which has resulted in an immeasurable amount of human death and suffering, and unfortunately continues to present in everyday life. At the time, hope was on the horizon with advanced research and development of several vaccines targeting key structural areas of the SARS-CoV-2 genome. These vaccines have proven their fundamental usefulness in combating the severity of this disease. However, the unequal and inequitable distribution of these resources is something we should examine and take actionable steps to address. Humanity is served by the unrepentant energy and activity of scientific research and those that endeavor to overcome these maladies. In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic The Einsteinium Foundation, owing to our own values and mission statement, led direct contributions towards the COVID-19 medical response.  Within only a few weeks of COVID-19’s designation as a global pandemic The Einsteinium Foundation took decisive action to help with resources and our volunteer efforts wherever we could. Members of the Einsteinium community and leadership of the foundation should be proud of their fast acting resolve and dedication. However, the critical steps we took are a small step compared to the impact of the pandemic and the enormous sacrifices made by front line workers. In 2022 we will continue to look for opportunities to contribute to science which benefits humanity and helps to alleviate pain and suffering. 

Our year in review

As we review our activity over the past year, we accomplished a major software development milestone after a long development cycle where we ran into a number of detailed and technical issues which needed to be resolved. We launched our MIL Mainnet. Which itself encountered, as can often be expected, a new error. We operated to quickly resolve and implement a strategy to move forward. Here, we rely on our deep development experience in the blockchain space.  We also took steps to strengthen and secure our blockchain using Komodo. In September 2018, the Einsteinium Foundation recognized Komodo dPoW as one of the best existing network security solutions. Komodo has an excellent core team, as well as a great and dedicated community of developers who are building incredible tools for the entire crypto community. Since its implementation, EMC2 has undergone serious blockchain attacks, which were successfully rejected due to the integration of dPoW. As a result, dPoW will be a significant security feature of MIL coin. We released an updated brand identity for the Milevium (MIL) project. This includes a new logo and font in the classic Einsteinium blue. You’ll see the new look anywhere we are out in public, like our website and all of our social channels dedicated to MIL. Very soon you’ll see it in all of our products supporting the MIL ecosystem including our official wallet. We believe that this new look better matches what we want the MIL project to be: an evolved chain, forked from EMC2. While EMC2 will continue to support promising scientific projects. We will discuss further actions regarding the release of MIL later in this letter.

Einsteinium Awards

The Einsteinium Foundation continues to support scientific research through the use of our annual award program. Scientific research is a long-term investment in our future, and the future of our planet. The Einsteinium Foundation is proud to continue to announce an open call for applications for the Einsteinium Award. We are interested in supporting a broad range of scientific work. Therefore, applicants from an academic university or graduate studies program are always encouraged to apply. We constantly seek top-level research from students, postdocs, and professors from all over the world. In addition, we also look for citizen science projects which engage its members and empower people to careers within science. Owing to this, we also hope to support local STEM/STEAM education as this guarantees the next generation of scientific researchers and thought leaders. For those interested in more information for our annual reward program please email us at projects@emc2.foundation.

Einsteinium Fellowships

As we continue to balance our operations as a cryptocurrency and philanthropic organization. On the anniversary of Einstein’s birthday in 2021 we announced that the Einsteinium Foundation will support the Einsteinium Fellowships, with details of this initiative described in our recent blog post. By encouraging researchers through recognition, time, and support we hope that continued effort on difficult problems across the sciences will lead to significant progress. We are eager to see the many examples of Einsteinium Fellows championing success in their field. We are especially supportive of young scientists, women, and underrepresented minorities, people who are beginning their careers and those trying to open up new areas of scientific discovery.

Expanding our listings on exchanges

We continue to look for new ways to increase the awareness for The Einsteinium Foundation and functionality of Einsteinium, our current product. Einsteinium, the coin, is available to trade on several top exchanges. We are excited by and fully support the recent community-driven activity to reach out to exchanges on our behalf. As a strong driving signal on the Foundation side and in order to reach a wider audience in the cryptocurrency community we are planning for additional exchange listings in the new year.

We are looking to add to the team

The Einsteinium Foundation is always looking to add to our team. As we anticipate expanding on our team, the Einsteinium Foundation is looking for a number of roles to contribute towards the success and adoption of Einsteinium.  We encourage anyone interested in any role with The Einsteinium Foundation to reach out to us.  For more information about this, reach out to us via the contact form on our main page (https://www.emc2.foundation/contact) to express your interest. Additionally, in specific, we are currently looking for a Blockchain Developer to work on our new cryptocurrency core that utilizes the Ethash mining algorithm (MIL). The ideal candidate will have strong hands-on development experience with Bitcoin or any other Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency core project.

A vision for Einsteiniums future

In the rest of this letter, we write about two areas we see as essential to building a better future: prioritizing equity and getting ready for the release of MIL. 

Prioritizing Equity

It is still early days and as blockchain technology reaches beyond the financial sector, we expect new applications and methods to be developed for the consumer and for the scientific community. We continue to see innovation at the intersection of scientific research and blockchain, and the development of widely adopted standardization and functional frameworks Additionally, we strongly believe in a necessary advantage for the utility of blockchain solutions surrounding the reproducibility crisis in the scientific community. As work in this arena moves from emerging literature to canon, we see a future where the digital ledger will be used to secure scientific data and hopefully can play a central role in dismantling the reproducibility crisis in scientific literature.

Scientific and medical advances and their resulting healthcare improvements should be available to everyone. However, systemic inequities in scientific and medical research, clinical care, and access to healthcare have contributed to an unequal healthcare system. The present moment underscores the need to address disparities in healthcare, beginning with the funders of scientific and medical research. Here, we see a fundamental role for cryptocurrency to address these problems in a global (borderless) way.

How can institutions ensure that their research study leaders and their ideas are diverse? How can foundations ensure that they are helping underserved and underrepresented communities? Ensuring equitable access to diverse backgrounds and ideas, which challenge strong held beliefs in the scientific community and thus are able push the boundaries of human knowledge further. How can scientists ensure that their studies represent diverse human populations? We often see results in particular human populations that do not generalize to all human populations. This is a major problem in understanding how different backgrounds contribute to health and disease. Public and private funders and industry experts need to change their strategic donations for scientific and medical research as this can help build a more equitable global health system.

We see a fundamental role here for Einsteinium. We believe that the following areas can be addressed:

  • Access to funding for countries with limited science programs.

  • Access to sustainable funding for early career researchers.

  • Sustainable funding, enabled through community-driven approaches.

  • High-risk high-reward grants to tackle paradigm changing ideas in a diverse array of fields.

  • Genius grants, where we provide multi-year sustainable funding for promising researchers and research areas.

  • Addressing the inequitable distribution of scientific funding. Where large academic institutions get the lionshares of available funding at the detriment of smaller institutions.

  • Corruption and “boys-club” mentality of late career researchers who have benefitted from inequitable situations and fail to take action to correct the circumstances for others.

  • Incremental science as a proxy for progress. Here, we hope to fund projects with exponential growth potential which can advance humanity to tackle our imminent problems.

Getting ready for the release of MIL

As we look towards 2022, we anticipate an exciting time where blockchain and cryptocurrency continue to mature. Through the work of our team members, we are well positioned for the release of MIL. We are excited at the opportunities this provides to continue to support a number of different avenues which contribute to fundamental scientific progress and the overarching mission of The Einsteinium Foundation. The Einsteinium Foundation is proud to be in the final stages of releasing MIL. A detailed description of MIL can be found in our Blue Paper. MIL represents a long-term and forward-looking project for the Foundation, and a defining project which solidifies the future of this organization. MIL represents an evolved blockchain, forked from EMC2, and our software development has focused on increasing technological improvements and functionality. Please, review our recent post describing our MIL roadmap for more details.

Here, we briefly describe our vision and roadmap for the delivery of MIL

  • The release of MIL will be a gamechanger for us.

  • We anticipate momentum and adoption to move from those classified as first movers in the cryptocurrency sphere to the psyche and utility of the mainstream.

  • MIL will position Einsteinium and the Einsteinium Foundation in a strong financial position and will be a technological leap forward. Einsteinium is an old coin in the cryptocurrency space with our genesis block being mined on March 1st 2014.

  • Over our history, the foundation has managed to overcome a variety of logistical, technical, micro- and macroeconomic challenges, continuing to learn how to efficiently operate in the blockchain space and grow our community all along the way. 

  • By using both coins (EMC2 and MIL) as a tool to search, recognize, reward and even fund the best scientific research, our ability to expand our reach and the probability of accomplishing our fundamental mission will be significantly stronger.

The Einsteinium Foundation is embarking on a truly ambitious path likely to change how cryptocurrency is viewed and used in the real world through the ongoing philanthropic support and dedication to scientific research. By allowing funds to circumvent political roadblocks, we can accelerate our ability to create rapid and necessary change. Such a mission requires a complex system of apps, platforms, services and coins, but all in a simple to use software hub. 

Einsteinium owes a debt of gratitude to the ongoing support and loyalty of our global community. We are very proud of the active and vocal global community Einsteinium has. Our hope is that our community keeps up the great work it has done to support our mission statement and core values for the foreseeable future. We are all in this together and want to do everything we can to help get all of us through these challenging times. It is only through the continued energy and efforts to drive change that we can accomplish our long term mission of being a cryptocurrency that supports scientific research in innovative ways. Our community has been a significant part of our team and we couldn't imagine a situation without you. Thank you for staying with us over the years and for the bright days to come. Throughout these unparalleled and difficult times, it is important that we support and reach out to one another. In this regard, the Einsteinium Foundation maintains a number of modern digital communication channels which I encourage anyone to reach out to us with. 

As we near the end of yet another unprecedented year, I extend my deepest gratitude to our community, especially those on the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis. Your exemplary service and dedication to Einsteinium allows us to continue growing and building towards our mission. Together, we have made it through another difficult year and we are confident that we will tackle whatever is ahead with continued optimism and grace.

The Einsteinium Foundation, from our family to yours, hopes that you and your loved ones are staying safe and healthy in these difficult times

Sincerely,

Leadership of The Einsteinium Foundation

About the Einsteinium Foundation: The Einsteinium Foundation is a non-profit organization (NPO), and the world's first NPO to be backed by cryptocurrency. The defining characteristics of The Einsteinium Foundation is its ongoing commitment to research and charitable missions throughout the world, and to the safeguarding, maintenance, and development of Einsteinium, an international digital currency built on a secure, decentralized open ledger, or blockchain.

Press contact: contact@einsteinium.foundation

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Alexander Lucaci