Ukraine Raises $18M in 24 hours with Crypto
After the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian government requested direct donations in the form on cryptocurrencies and so far have raised ~$18M.
At this point, we’ve all seen the memes from the Ukrainian government’s twitter account, but what we haven’t seen before is a government leveraging social media and cryptocurrencies to actively assist in a conflict. There has been large-scale sharing of information about Russian troop movements on Twitter, as well as crypto fundraising through Twitter.
Within 24 hours of the Ukrainian government tweeting out their Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDT addresses, they saw roughly $14M worth of donations. Vatlik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, quickly jumped on this to warn that people should hold off for verification that this was not a hack. After speaking with a few officials, Vitalik confirmed that these addresses were controlled by the Ukrainian government. He also pointed individuals to another charity, ukrainedao.love, to help citizens suffering from the conflict. The charity has raised funds via an auction of an NFT, which is currently at over 1,100 ETH (~$3.8M). Vitalik, a Russian-born Canadian, has been outspoken against Putin’s actions.
Some well known crypto founders have also given money to the Ukrainian government. In particular, Gavin Wood, the founder of Polkadot, offered to give $5M in DOT and Justin Sun, the founder of TRON, made a $200k donation. In addition to these notable names, there has also been an anonymous donation of $3M BTC. As far as companies go, Binance announced an emergency relief fund which has raised $5.8M of the targeted $20M.
Earlier this month, both Russia and Ukraine legalized cryptocurrencies in what appears to be a savvy move for individuals to protect their money through volatile times.