Shawn Corey Carter aka Jay-Z grew up in the Marcy Houses of Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. On Thursday, the rapper announced he and Block CEO Jack Dorsey are giving back to his childhood home by creating the Bitcoin Academy, a program to teach financial literacy.
The Bitcoin Academy will consist of a series of online and in-person classes beginning later this month, including "What is Money?" and "What is Blockchain?"
The program, open to anyone from Marcy Houses, will also include a "crypto kids camp" and provide participants with a mobile hotspot and a nominal amount of Bitcoin for hands-on learning.
Instruction will be provided two evenings per week until early September, and students will receive dinner. Block and Jay-Z's charity staff, the Shawn Carter Foundation, will help with on-the-ground instruction.
Jay-Z and Dorsey announced the program, which will begin at Marcy Houses but may be expanded to other neighborhoods, on Thursday morning.
The classes will be taught through an educational group, Crypto Blockchain Plug, and Black Bitcoin Billionaire, a group that seeks to introduce Black people to Bitcoin and has received a grant from Block in the past.
Jay-Z, Dorsey collab 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.
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In 2021, Dorsey's Block (then known as Square) acquired the rapper's streaming music service catlled Tidal, which the pair have proposed using as a vehicle for NFT distribution.
Dorsey and Jay-Z, who is also an investor in blockchain startups like Alchemy, launched an endowment in 2021 to fund Bitcoin development in Africa and India too.
Dorsey is funding the new Bitcoin Academy out of his own pocket (as is Jay-Z) but has also pushed crypto-related charitable endeavors at Block, including a $5 million fund backed by revenue from interest earned on the company's corporate Bitcoin holdings.
