Bitcoin and Crypto Users Race to Aid Ukraine
Amid recent government regulations within Ukraine’s financial sector, cryptocurrency aid is currently the primary source of assistance coming in for the country.
Within a week of Russia's invasion into the Ukraine, the defending country received several million dollars worth of bitcoin and crypto donations through the Come Back Alive Foundation (CBA), a Ukrainian NGO aimed at providing military support.
Goin into the weekend, donations were sitting at over $5 million, equivalent to about 128 BTC. As of Monday, however, donations had increased at an outstanding rate.
Latest Donation Efforts and Updates
On Friday, Ukraine vice prime minister, Mykhailo Fedorov, tweeted about Ukraine accepting donations of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Tether and provided a respective wallet address for each. Ukraine’s official account later posted the same addresses. Since then, millions in donations have flooded in with $23.3 million alone being raised through the tweeted addresses.
Ukraine’s ministry of digital transformation recently posted about plans for using incoming donations saying, "How will we use money? To destroy as much Russian soldiers as possible."
Elliptic is currently posting live updates on donation status. Their most recent report is as of 2:45PM UTC stating that $30.8 million has been raised with a total of over 26,000 total donations.
Additional Support from NGO’s
Along with direct donations to the Ukrainian government, non-government organizations and other initiatives are making efforts to raise funds as well.
One NFT trader, Andrew Wang, took his thoughts to Twitter on using NFTs to raise funds. His tweet was circulated to 140,000 followers saying,
"We have all these tools. We have crypto, we have communities, we have art, we have smart contracts... Instead of just raising crypto, what if we brought artists together, wrote a smart contract and deployed it to raise ether?"
Through Mr. Wang’s efforts, along with the support of organizers, developers and artists, the Reli3f group was born, and 61 Ether ($160,000) was sent to three organizations, including the aforementioned Come Back Alive Foundation.
Volunteer and hacking groups have ramped up their donation efforts as well, with some of the donations being equipment for Ukrainian military forces.