Over $ 22 million worth of cryptocurrency has already been donated in support of the Ukrainian people against the invasion of the Russian army. The funds were raised thanks to the initiative of the Ukrainian government, NGOs and voluntary associations through their electronic wallets. According to researchers from Elliptic, a start-up that provides analysis on transactions via blockchain, the anonymous donations, devolved to the cause of Ukraine, are mainly in bitcoin and ether but the share of stablecoins is also in significant proportion.
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The Ukrainian government used the account of Twitter to enlist people’s help by advertising two wallet addresses for bitcoin, ethereum and tether cryptocurrencies. In a short time, in a crescendo of solidarity, several million dollars were paid, most of them small donations, equal to an average value of 95 dollars. Sam Bankman-Fried, US entrepreneur, founder and CEO of FTX, however, donated a large sum of 250 thousand dollars in tether while the Ukrainian government obtained 277 thousand dollars in tether from Deepak Thapliyal, CEO of the company Chain.
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The contributions that continue to flow into Ukraine’s digital wallets (currently $ 22.8 million corresponding to more than 24 thousand donations) are also the result of crypto-activism activities by NGOs such as Come Back Alive. This army-backed organization, therefore suspended from the Patreon crowdfunding platform for violating the rules that prohibit funding for military activities, managed to raise several million dollars.
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In parallel, $ 281,769 in ethereum was raised by the independent Help Ukraine project which made the amount available to Ukrainian humanitarian associations through Support Ukrainian Sovereignty. On the other hand, three million ethereum were collected by the Russian artistic collective of Pussy Riot which, together with the investment group PleasrDao and the studio Trippy Labs, created UkraineDao – a decentralized autonomous organization (Dao) project that follows the example of AssangeDao, born in support of Juliane Assange, founder of Wikileaks, – in support of the Ukrainian resistance and to distribute aid to the population victims of the bombings.
In addition to cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are also used as a tool for donation. This is the case of “I support Ukraine” which promises to donate the proceeds from the sale of nft to Come Back Alive. 1.86 million dollars of a single donation, received by the Ukrainian government, according to Elliptic reports, comes from the sale of NFT. It is therefore by resorting to means such as bitcoin or nft, alternatives to traditional methods, that, in times of war conflict, it is possible to guarantee the flow of funding, avoiding possible blockages on accounts and circumventing obstacles on transactions. Cryptocurrencies are resources that are increasingly being drawn upon as they allow faster use and easier access, particularly effective for reaching a wider audience and broadening the spectrum of international donations.