Role of Crypto plays in Russia/Ukraine War — Love Is Decentralized

One of the advantages of blockchain is the realization of peer-to-peer transactions without third parties, forming a financial system beyond geographical and national restrictions. The blockchain-based decentralized financial system has gradually shown its social power in the Russia/Ukraine war.

Right after Russia attacked Ukraine, the official Ukrainian twitter account tweeted out a plea for aid, accompanied with two long strings of letters and digits (the Bitcoin and Ethereum addresses of the Ukrainian government). As of March 17, the Ukrainian government has collected more than $50 million in Bitcoin, ETH, ERC-20 stablecoins, and other assets such as DOT, DAI, and even Dogecoin.

On February 25th, UkraineDAO was officially established. According to the official Twitter of UkraineDAO, this organization will be used to raise funds for Ukrainian organizations helping those suffering from the war in Ukraine. Since then, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has also showed his support for the organization on social media.

According to GoodData, UkraineDAO has minted 10,000 Ukrainian flag NFTs on Ethereum and put them on PartyBid, raising a total of $6.7 million through the sale of NFTs. In return, they distributed commemorative “valueless” tokens called “Love” to donors.

In addition to its support for the Ukrainian government and organizations, crypto has also proven useful to individual Ukrainians affected by the war. A Ukrainian who fled to Kazakhstan tweeted that he was unable to use his debit and credit cards, leaving crypto as his only financial aid.

The performance of the crypto in this Russia Ukraine War shows the great potential of decentralized finance in social applications. We have seen the highly active DAO in raising funds, and we have also seen that NFTs do not only exist in the field of art collections.

GoodData believes that although war is cruel, the world’s treasure of life and aiming for peace is always a consensus. Crypto actually connects this consensus in a decentralized way and gathers it into a powerful force, spreading love and hope.