The France Macau Chamber of Commerce (FMCC) launched its new “Empowerment Night”, a bi-monthly casual evening talk-cum-networking event, at the Sofitel Macau at Ponte 16 last night, highlighting the topic of crypto-philanthropy.
“It is a casual event where we have one speaker talking about a subject. It’s a free talk with any topic – something new, something interesting, something that’s happening in the world – where the audience can learn something from it,” FMCC Chairman Rutger Verschuren told Macao News on the sidelines of last night’s event.
According to Verschuren, the FMCC Empowerment Night – scheduled on the second Tuesday every other month – is different from the more-formal monthly FMCC Breakfast Meeting, which has been held on the last Wednesday of each month.
The FMCC Empowerment Night’s speakers do not have to be experts in the topics but have “passion”, Verschuren added. “More importantly, they should bring something new and interesting [topics] to the audience.”
Mentioning topics he would like to see in the coming Empowerment Nights, he said, “New trends in lifestyle or it can be about investment trends these days. The things that are happening in the world that are new and trendy,” from fashion, culture, environment, climate change and sustainability to the latest technology in medicine.
He added, tongue-in-cheek: “I don’t think we want to talk about oil or gas prices. We do not want to talk about politics. I think it should be a light topic that can be easily explained over a glass of wine.”
Meanwhile, last night’s speaker, Lurdes de Sousa, told Macao News after presenting her topic “The Power of the Tech for Good: Is 2022 the Year of Crypto-Philanthropy?” that cryptocurrency is important for the philanthropic world because “it’s the future”.
Crypto-Philanthropy is the way philanthropic entities utilise digital tokens or non-fungible tokens and their underlying cryptography-based technology, namely the blockchain, for fundraising, according to Sousa, founding president of the Associação Internacional de Filantropia (Macau).
“Cryptocurrency has a lot of importance in donations because you can have transparency, where you can trace the money you donate,” she said, adding that she hoped to see “more and more young people with crypto wallets make donations and have a charitable mind through crypto-philanthropy”, despite the concept being still “not very popular” in Macao.
“Crypto-philanthropy has been going on since 2013. It works very well in some parts of the world because they are aware of it, while some parts of the world are not aware of it. I think in Macao, we are still not aware of ‘The Power of the Tech for Good’,” Sousa said.
