$MIRA Background

September 2024, my family’s life took an unexpected turn when our 5 year old daughter Mira was diagnosed with a rare brain tumor called an adamantinomatous craniopharyngioma. While it is benign and 90% of children survive, because of its location in the brain, it’s associated with the worst quality of life scores out of all survivable brain tumors—from hypothalmic obesity to stunted growth to even blindness. In Mira’s case, we have been advised by Dr. Juan Fernandez-Miranda at Stanford Medicine that her tumor is inoperable without significant impact to her long term health.

In order to find better options for Mira, I started spending nights and weekends reading every scientific paper I could find on this disease. Because of its rarity and relatively favorable mortality rate, very little funding and research has been directed towards it. This is why starting in October, my wife and I began making a series of personal donations to the Hankinson Lab at the Children’s Hospital of Colorado, the only research team in North America focused on this devastating condition.

How $MIRA Came to Be

To increase awareness and accelerate funding for this disease, on Christmas Eve, my wife and I also launched a GoFundMe campaign for the Hankinson Lab, pledging an additional $100,000 in personal donations along with it.

When this happened, people began asking me to post a crypto address for donations.

I have been on and off active on Ethereum since 2017, so I immediately posted my ENS (blader.eth). But people kept asking me for a Solana address. At the time, I didn’t post one because I didn’t have one, but I eventually created one the next day.

What happened next was nothing short of miraculous: a Solana community member created a memecoin called $MIRA, which has already sent $1,000,000 in donations to the Hankinson Lab. I publicly committed then that every single penny in my Solana wallet will be used exclusively for donations to rare disease causes, with all donations trackable on chain.

Having now known the living nightmare of having a child with a incurable disease, my wife and I both decided we couldn’t live with ourselves if we were to walk away from a chance to help not just Mira, but potentially thousands of other children and their families with transformative funding for their own rare diseases.

$MIRA represents my wife Yi and I’s commitment to giving hope to as many other families as possible.