War of The Worlds
On 24 February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. We3 looks at how Ukraine’s resistance pit DeFi and CeFi against one another.
Just before the anniversary of Russia’s invasion into Ukraine, they have found new ways to defend their freedom from violent tyranny on the 21st-century battlefield.
The Ukrainian government has been treating this war as more than just a military effort. From putting together a volunteer “IT Army” to hack Russian websites, to using Musk’s Starlink satellite internet to maintain comms when ground-based infrastructure was destroyed, and even taking their resistance to the web by running campaigns to win worldwide support: In early March 2022, the Ukrainian Government raised more than $42 million in cryptocurrency in less than six days, and according to Ukraine Support Tracker, an independent source by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, between 24 January and 3 October 2022, just over 52 billion Euros have been collectively raised in military, financial, and humanitarian aid from 40 countries. The Russia-Ukraine conflict has become the first where crypto is a key variable — both as a potential vehicle for Russia to evade sanctions and as a tool to support the side occupying the moral high ground according to majority opinion — Russia excluded, of course.
On the tech front, so far Ukraine is winning. Russian leaders, despite having an overwhelmingly bigger and more traditional “guns, tanks and soldiers” army, seem to be stuck in the 20th century and fraught with many weak points, including entrenched corruption in the armed forces, while Ukraine’s IT-army of 20-something teenagers hacking away from bedrooms and living rooms worldwide in their pajamas are exposing and exploiting the fragility of Russian cyber-security. With Google search and WikiHow articles as their basic training, they taught themselves basic hacking in a few days and after a few weeks of training, they were able to breach Russia’s cyber defenses.
The Telegram app group chat IT Army of Ukraine has more than 300,000 members worldwide. Every day, they would check the Telegram group for a list of Russian organization and company websites to target. They bombarded these sites with fake requests, thereby crippling the sites with a sudden overload of traffic. One such attack was on 11 May 2022 on Russia’s largest streaming service RuTube (Russia’s YouTube competitor), which was knocked offline for days. Other targeted websites including the Kremlin’s site, the Russian advisory assembly the Duma’s website, as well as the state media mouthpiece Russia Today’s online ops.
Outside the Ukrainian IT Army, netizens are also playing an active part in Ukraine’s defense against Russian invasion. For instance, members of Anonymous, the global online hacker collective, have chosen to devote their skills to cutting through the firewalls of Russian government propaganda and delivering the facts about the war to Russians. Anonymous’ decision to declare “cyber war” against Russia was a decentralized and collective choice to pick a side, not an order from government or military command.
Crypto on the frontline
It’s unlikely that those who have lost homes or loved ones would agree that crypto is the headline here, and it really shouldn’t be. However, the chaos of war often gives rise to alternative economies — like how black market helped rebuild the Japanese economy post–World War II, while this tragic war is unveiling the unique virtues of internet money.
In Japan, many “yami-ichi” (black markets) popped up on every corner after World War II. Black markets filled the need left by the collapse in distribution and rationing, thereby weakening central government control on markets. An abundance of easily accessible open spaces in these cities such as the enforced evacuation areas and ruins left by Allied aerial bombardments provided space for street stalls. Even though black markets were illegal, its social recognition didn’t remain entirely negative because, after all, it was keeping the people alive when all else failed.
In these yami-ichi, social rank counted for nothing and sellers weren’t questioned about status, family origin, nationality or education. Everyone was welcome, from high-ranking military officers to lowly privates, landed nobles to tenant farmers, college professors to gamblers. Everyone equal, selling from their mats on the street. Everyone was dressed in ragged clothes, lived in corrugated tin shacks, and washed themselves with water stored in oil drums. Today, the internet functions as the ultimate equalizer: A 17-year-old from Wisconsin in a Spongebob SquarePants T-shirt can just as easily make influential contributions to the war effort as a pinstriped politician. And they do.
We’ve also learnt that when central systems fail, decentralized ones can provide a potent solution. Since martial law came into effect in Ukraine on 24 February 2022, the central bank imposed limitations making foreign currency transactions difficult for volunteer organizations within Ukraine. So making a payment in US dollars for critical military equipment or humanitarian efforts became almost impossible. And suppliers weren’t exactly standing in line to accept payment in the Ukrainian Hryvnia — currencies from countries being invaded are notoriously unstable, and in this case the Ruble also took a hit, even though it eventually stabilized. While martial law was meant to protect the country from capital leakage, it was very much a double-edged sword, and a very blunt one at that — severely hampering all direly-needed Ukrainian volunteer efforts.
A DAO to the rescue
Web2 platforms like GoFundMe and Patreon weren’t of any use to Ukrainians either, as government restrictions and centralized Silicon Valley tech platforms generally prohibit military fundraising. Which is understandable and also the reason why we don’t see warlords raising funds for their private armies on these platforms.
But where did that leave Ukraine? They had tens of thousands of people worldwide who wanted to send help. They desperately needed the help. But there was no way of connecting the two.
Enter Sergey Vasylchuk, CEO of Ukraine-based blockchain company Everstake, who put one and one together and came up with crypto as a way to enable fast and secure donations. Another benefit of blockchain’s public digital ledger of transactions was transparency. It’s nice for a donor to be able to see where their crypto was spent. So not long after the invasion, Sergey contacted his buddy Anatoly Yakovenko, who just happened to be Solana’s co-founder. Together, they set up a Solana-based crypto relief effort DAO called Aid for Ukraine DAO, in partnership with FTX and the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation.
Just to recap, a DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization. In theory, a DAO is a blockchain-based collective that isn’t governed by one person or entity. Instead, its rules and governance are coded in smart contracts and cannot be changed unless voted upon by the DAOs members. Imagine it as a group chat of friends with a shared bank account and democratized power. This DAO enabled the Ukrainian government to accept cryptocurrency donations directly from donors, while FTX handled the conversion from crypto to euros or dollars for deposit into the central bank.
“Our banks were limited, there were restrictions on our use of fiat currencies and we were rapidly running out of supplies,” said Alex Bornyakov, one of Ukraine’s deputy ministers for digital transformation. “Even if you manage to pay in fiat, a wire transfer takes a few days to reach the recipient, with crypto, it takes minutes.”
When Russia invaded, President Zelensky made a quick and smart move by passing a bill whereby Ukrainian and foreign crypto exchanges could operate legally in Ukraine once officially registered with the Ukraine government. Banks were also allowed to open crypto accounts, thereby making fiat-crypto exchanges easier. The National Bank of Ukraine and the National Securities and Stock Market Commission were appointed as regulators. Before the bill was passed, crypto had been in legal limbo for some time in Ukraine, being stuck in the gray zone of neither legal nor forbidden due to a lack of legislative clarity.
It’s worth noting that even though many cast Zelensky in the role of shining savior of his people, there is one big problem: Ukraine is extremely corrupt. According to Wikipedia, in 2012 Ernst & Young put Ukraine among the three most-corrupt nations from 43 surveyed, alongside Colombia and Brazil. In 2015 The Guardian called Ukraine “the most corrupt nation in Europe”. Of course, after the Russian invasion, with billions of US aid flowing into Ukraine, the corruption problem was pushed onto the back burner, but it didn’t go away. As recently as October 2021, the US embassy in Kyiv released this, as reported in a July 2022 NPR article “Corruption concerns involving Ukraine are revived as the war with Russia drags on”:
“The EU and the US are greatly disappointed by unexplained and unjustifiable delays in the selection of the Head of the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Office, a crucial body in the fight against high-level corruption,” the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv said on Oct. 9.
Which is another nice thing about crypto vs fiat — it’s impossible to tell if a couple of million dollars of fiat disappears into a politician’s pocket, especially in the fog of war. The issue of Ukrainian corruption is also very much on the mind of President Zelensky, whose government is on the receiving end of billions of dollars, not only in the form of military equipment like HIMARS rockets from the US and Leopard tanks from Germany, but also in cold, hard cash straight to the Ukrainian government. Needless to say, it’s much easier to make a couple of million disappear than, say, a couple of tanks. As recently as January 2023, Pres. Zelensky has gotten rid of 11 government officials after an investigative journalist exposed one of them driving a Porsche and moving his family into the mansion of a well-known property developer, as recently reported on by the BBC.
With this law in place, Ukraine’s first crypto exchange, Kuna, wouldn’t be limited to only spend the donations with crypto-friendly suppliers to help the country; now they’re allowed to convert the crypto to fiat. The Ukrainian government had been spending its crypto fundraising on thousands of bulletproof vests, food rations, helmets and medical supplies — deliberately choosing to spend the funds on non-lethal equipment, so as not to deter future donors. It wouldn’t be good for business if your crypto donation went towards a 15cm bullet tearing through the flesh of a poorly trained 22-year old Russian forced into conscription as cannon fodder by his autocratic government.
While crypto is sometimes seen as an investment vehicle reserved for the privileged, the technology seems almost custom-made to overcome the challenges of a beleaguered Ukraine. “A Bitcoin transaction takes 10, 20, 30 minutes versus a wire transfer that might take two or three days, and you can’t be sure of that — by then the Russians might have bombed a national bank,” says native Ukrainian now Californian Illia Polosukhin, the co-founder of US blockchain protocol Near.
Polosukhin started another Ukraine-aid DAO called Unchain, which has raised more than $9 million so far. Another bonus is that these crypto funds accept donations anonymously. So any potential givers with business or family ties to Russia, but who can’t bring themselves to support the Russian invasion can also donate safely and without fear of persecution.
Can art save the world?
Even NFTs were made into instruments of resistance. Ukraine’s Ministries of Digital Transformation and Culture collaborated on an NFT Museum called Meta History: Museum of War. First announced in March, the NFT museum not only aims to aid the country but also to restore its cultural heritage.
“We will never let any single day of this period disappear from the ledger of world history,” the project’s website says.
Initially, the platform dropped 54 NFTs to raise money for the Ukrainian government. Its mission statement is “to preserve the memory of the real events of that time, to spread truthful information among the digital community in the world and to collect donations for the support of Ukraine.”
History is written by victors, until now.
As Winston Churchill famously said, “history is written by victors”, but what if blockchain and its immutable ledger could change that? Altered histories are dangerous, and hold our cultural evolution back, let’s look at Holocaust denial and distortion as an example: Despite millions of verified historical documents that prove the genocide beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever, there are still Holocaust deniers out there who claim that the Holocaust was invented or exaggerated by Jews as part of a plot to advance Jewish interests. 80 years after the genocide, thousands of people on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and YouTube used the hashtag #holohoax to spread conspiracy theories and delegitimize history in order to further political agendas (typically, white nationalist ones). Similar voices have been torturing the families of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting. Those families have been re-traumatized, having to relive the worst day of their lives, as Alex Jones screams “Hoax! Hoax! Hoax!”. With Jones’ recent trial and punitive damages he was slapped with, people might begin to realize that free speech and the blatant spread of disinformation leading to persecution of parents who lost their children are not the same thing, at least as far as the legal system is concerned.
With state-owned media in Putin’s propaganda toolbox and a newly created law making it an offense punishable by up to 15 years in jail for Russian or foreign journalists in Russia to even use the words “war” or “invasion”, using blockchain and its immutable ledger can be a way to ensure that events don’t fall through the cracks of history, regardless of the outcome of the war.
The Meta History Museum selects news pertaining to important events of the war, then NFT artists from around the world create artworks based on their interpretations of the news and tweets from important figures like President Zelenskyy, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, and the White House. One NFT, for example, features a tweet from French President Emmanuel Macron, about European sanctions to ban Russian crude oil. The accompanying graphic depicts a guillotine with a Russian oil barrel underneath it, illustrated by artist Yana Svyatkina. The Museum then mints these artworks into NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain and sells them, creating both an immutable piece of history, as well as raising money for the war effort
The other artists have chosen to represent their assigned tweet literally, depicting politicians shaking hands as sanctions are placed, or smoldering buildings as missiles crash into city centers. Others play with symbols like rats, monsters, shadowy figures and men in blood-stained suits to represent Russia, or sunflowers, children’s drawings, playgrounds, and birds to represent Ukraine.
Since late March, the museum has raised between $650,000 and $850,000 in donations for the Ukrainian government, but its momentum has been stagnating. Today, Meta History Museum’s success is tempered by concerns about resales, virality, and the pressure to keep holding the attention of the internet.
Follow the money.
Blockchain’s transparent and immutable transactions reveal (and prove) exactly who is paying who. Research showed that, despite sanctions, crypto of at least $4 million has been raised by groups supporting Russian militias in Ukraine.
Meanwhile, the process of tracing the crypto flowing into Russia has produced some unlikely heroes. Chainalysis, Elliptic, and TRM Labs as well as investigators at Binance, found that recipients include paramilitary groups offering ammunition and equipment, military contractors, and weapons manufacturers. That flow of funds, often to officially sanctioned groups, shows no sign of slowing down and may even be accelerating: Chainalysis has traced roughly $1.8 million in funding to Russian military groups since August. And despite how relatively easy it is to trace those funds, freezing or blocking them has proven difficult, due largely to unregulated or sanctioned crypto exchanges (most of them Russian-based), who are happily cashing out the millions in crypto donations for use by the invaders.
Other organizations that Binance spotted raising money through crypto crowdfunding on Telegram are the pro-Russian nationalist groups Save Donbass and REAR and also Russian arms maker Lobaev, who bluntly solicited donations on Telegram. Another group, Romanov Light, whose fundraising was spotted by TRM Labs and Elliptic, claimed to be raising as much as $330,000 worth of donations for Russian special forces. The donations were used to fund Russian weapon accessories, flashlights, and armor plates.
Do not pass go and do not collect $200.
Outside of the race to outraise, Russian oligarchs also relied heavily on crypto as their “emergency off ramp”. The first sanctions against Russia isolated the country’s financial system. By removing Russian banks from the Swift international money transfer system, freezing dollar reserves deposited abroad and halting VISA & Mastercard withdrawals the west essentially crippled the money flow in and out of Russia. This has caused both Oligarchs and ordinary Russians, an inability to access or move their money.
Imagine all your fortunes frozen within days. Bank accounts. Real estate acquisitions and sales. Even mega-yachts could find no safe harbor! Well, at least crypto is still there, right? The stateless form of money, free from government control and all that good stuff. Helping you move your billions around smoothly. Da! (aka Yes if your Russian is a bit rusty). But it seemed to be a maybe or even a hard no to use crypto for the ridiculously vast amounts that Putin’s best buddies accumulated.
But why!!! Firstly, because the industry just doesn’t have hundreds of billions of dollars of liquidity. Keep in mind that the entire crypto market cap is about $2 trillion. Furthermore, the Russian government has put precisely zero effort into creating the necessary infrastructure to operate a crypto-based alternative to its Ruble economy.
But it wasn’t just the gazillionaires who were having issues, ordinary Russians were stuck as-well, due to lack of off-ramps and local regulation. For example, thousands of Russian tourists were stranded in Thailand’s beach resorts when the Visa and MasterCard axes came hurling down. The Thai Government tried to create emergency crypto off ramps (basically by trying to coarse hotels to accept crypto payments), but lack of infrastructure proved the attempt futile, once again proving that you can’t just switch the ‘crypto on button’ when you’re in a pickle. It seems like countries will have to lay down the groundwork in order to take advantage of the new economy, when Fiat and other financial off-ramps fail.
Russian oligarchs also find themselves in a new era of ‘Crypto-Transparency’, where regulation is stricter and tracking is easier. Beyond technical problems, the regulation now governing financial institutions and cryptocurrency exchanges has forced crypto into a new even-more-transparent era, preventing the mega rich from moving money around freely. Most new regulations are around mandatory KYC, an identity verification process known in the banking world as ‘Know Your Customer’. This banking term is now as prevalent in cryptoville as it is in TradeFi banking. Some exchanges, of course, do not require identity verification. However, the conversion of crypto into fiat and the use of crypto to buy stuff is easily trackable.
If the oligarchs had wealth in cryptocurrencies outside the exchange circuit, they could have spent it, as long as they found someone who would accept it. But right now even that’s complicated, while you can convert a thousand or five thousand euros in cryptocurrencies discreetly, converting millions is impossible. For that, you need banks,” said Xavier Pérez Corominas, professor of the subject “Blockchain, NFTs & Metaversero” in ESADE Business School, Barcelona.
That doesn’t mean these individuals or their families might not turn to crypto in the future. Ari Redbord, Head of Legal and Government Affairs at TRM Labs blockchain intelligence, said the sanctioned oligarchs are likely to use any and every tool to stop their wealth from being seized around the world. “We’ve seen all sorts of shell companies and different complex laundering schemes over the years. They will use absolutely everything that they can and crypto will be part of that playbook,” said Redbord.
Elon the Twitter Warrior.
When Russia occupied the city of Kherson in South-Ukraine, web pages stopped loading on people’s devices at 14:43 on May 30. For the next 59 minutes, anyone connecting to the internet with KhersonTelecom — known locally as SkyNet — couldn’t call loved ones, read the latest news, or upload images to Instagram. And when the internet came back to life at 15:43 that day, everything appeared to be normal. Except that it wasn’t: Now all internet traffic passed through a Russian provider and Putin’s online censorship machine.
Disrupting and disabling internet infrastructure has been one of Putin’s common tactics. Controlling the narrative through the flow of information is a powerful and well-used weapon. Russia destroyed TV towers, launched cyberattacks against satellite systems, and spread disinformation to break Ukrainian’s spirits. Russian troops were telling people in areas without internet access that their country “does not exist anymore”.
Enter Elon: Since the start of the war, he’s been playing a major role in helping Ukraine fight Russian propaganda. When Russia destroyed Ukrainian cell towers, forcing hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians to live in the information dark, Musk’s satellite-based Starlink provided hope.
At the time of writing, Musk’s SpaceX had donated more than 20,000 satellite units to provide internet access in parts of Ukraine, thereby helping stop Russia from controlling the country’s internet. Nice one, Elon. The world praised him. President Zelenskyy thanked him — a beautiful bromance. But then, Elon had to blow it.
One would think that with Tesla’s disappointing third quarter last year and his Twitter purchase (finally!) and making kitchen sink jokes, he’d have put his diplomatic efforts temporarily on hold. But no, the richest man in the world had to keep his finger in that pie as well, and share his best ideas on how to end the war in Ukraine.
On 3 October, hours after tweeting a cartoon T-Rex taking a shower, Musk polled his 107 million Twitter followers, and continued telling the future and postulating that Ukraine would be forced to make peace with Russia. Unsurprisingly, this pissed some people off. A Ukrainian diplomat, Andrij Melnyk, replied to the tweet with a very clear message, “F*** off is my very diplomatic reply to you @elonmusk.”
Generally acknowledged as a notorious sh*tposter, Musk reworded the poll: “Let’s try this then: the will of people who live in the Donbas & Crimea should decide whether they’re part of Russia or Ukraine.” While the first poll had 59.1% of the 2.7 million respondents voting “No” to his idea of “peace”, 54.6% of the 973,000 voters said that the people of eastern Ukraine and Crimea should have the right to join the country of their choosing.
President Zelenskyy then responded to the tweet with his own poll: “Which @elonmusk do you like more?” which resulted in 78.8% of 2.4 million respondents voting “One who supports Ukraine”. However, in all seriousness, Zelenskyy shared his opinion on the matter, pointing out that Musk has one important point in his thread: It is important not to underestimate the potential for a nuclear exchange, even if it is “unlikely”. A guy like Putin, who fancies himself a bit of a man’s man, isn’t likely to take military defeat by Ukraine lightly. He just doesn’t seem like that kinda guy.
As with most things Elon, the drama continues. On 14 October 2022, he drew more flak by saying that SpaceX couldn’t keep carrying the cost of Starlink in Ukraine indefinitely, since Starlink service has become critical in Ukraine’s war effort as it advanced into Russia-occupied territories. When asked what was behind the warning over Starlink, Musk tweeted jokingly that he was just following Melnyk’s recommendation to “f*** off”.
Then, a day after signaling to bail Starlink out of the war, Musk seemed to change his mind, again. On 15 October, he tweeted: “The hell with it … even though Starlink is still losing money & other companies are getting billions of taxpayer $, we’ll just keep funding Ukraine govt for free.”
Despite Musk taking all the hero credits, in reality, CNN reported that SpaceX sent a letter to the Pentagon in September, asking it to take over Starlink’s funding for use by Ukraine.
It’s not completely clear who is currently footing the bill for the service. A document obtained by The New York Times recorded that the U.S. Agency for International Development had paid for some, the Polish and other European governments for some, and various militaries and NGOs contributing for the cost of transport, installation, and apparently the monthly fees for the service itself. USAID described “a range of stakeholders” providing a first wave of support totaling around $15 million at the time. The document also stated that SpaceX donated about 3,000 satellites to Ukraine, while the 3 governments funded nearly 17,000.
The costs weren’t a one-time thing. Musk recently tweeted that the satellite terminals deployed to Ukraine were 5 times the original shipment — thousands have been destroyed in the war, and more are needed. The connectivity supposedly costs $4,500 a month for the highest tier of service. He also tweeted that the total ongoing costs reach almost $20 million a month. But Elon seems to make both friends and enemies wherever he goes, with SpaceX’s request for the US military to foot the bill annoying Pentagon top brass, with one senior defense official saying that SpaceX has “the gall to look like heroes” while having others pay so much and now presenting them with a bill for tens of millions per month.
Court of war.
Prosecuting war crimes is a difficult task, even in an age when pictures and video can be instantly shared on social media — because they can just as quickly be removed. Plus, the journey these digital bits take from the camera lens to presentation before a judge is complex, lengthy and often fraught with risks. The tools to manipulate digital media are as easily accessible and easy to use as the phone cameras used to capture them.
The distrust of digital platforms has placed digital evidence on shaky ground. This is where Web3 can help set the record straight. Far from Lambos and mooning lies the huge potential that the maturation of tools like blockchain and distributed ledger offer to establish — a new technical, normative and legal understanding of digital integrity.
In early March, a Ukrainian Telegram user posted a photo of wreckage at a school in a suburb of Kharkiv, Ukraine. The photo showed the side of a classroom with a large blast hole and a pile of debris including desks and chairs. International law clearly prohibits intentional attacks on educational facilities which means the picture could be evidence of a potential war crime.
Together with a team of human rights experts and lawyers, Starling, a blockchain based research center, submitted evidence of this attack and four others to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Netherlands. An investigation into allegations of war crimes in Ukraine in the months following Russia’s invasion in late February has been opened.
Starling’s record isn’t a typical exhibit. Instead, the group’s submission will feature publicly available online information that’s been stored and verified using the blockchain, making it the first evidence of its kind submitted to any court of law.
By leveraging the blockchain ledger, Starling was able to prove the information was never manipulated and also ensure it won’t disappear, because unlike data stored on cloud services like Google Drive or server farms like AWS the blockchain is immutable.
Starling’s method could also be useful to clear disinformation. In their evidence submission of the classroom blast to the International Criminal Court, it noted that a “pro-Russian online source” was trying to reframe the narrative around it. Jonathan Dotan, the founder of Starling Lab, said the approach is not just innovative technology — it represents a new way of thinking about war crime evidence from a legal perspective.
Starling Lab’s Tech Deep Dive.
Starling’s building blocks of digital authenticity consist of seamless end-to-end and immutable integration of Layer-1 and Layer-2 blockchain protocols, NFTs, and secure hardware wallets.
How does it work? While the underlying technology supporting it is complex, the framework consists of three simple and clear objectives:
Capture
Archiving the post and its metadata — the author, the date it was created and how many times it was viewed, also the surrounding site context and the profile of the user. Unique “fingerprints” are created with cryptography, which would change if the information was altered.
Store
The fingerprints and metadata are registered on multiple blockchains (much like the traditional process when a notary confirms someone possesses a legal document). Files are uploaded to two decentralized storage networks, Filecoin and Storj, then stored by various nodes around the world instead of on a single cloud system.
Verify
The fingerprints and metadata are registered on multiple blockchains (much like the traditional process when a notary confirms someone possesses a legal document). Files are uploaded to two decentralized storage networks, Filecoin and Storj, then stored by various nodes around the world instead of on a single cloud system.
So what now.
In the end, the race of technologies in this war made us raise a question: Whose side is Web3 on? When Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin, the whole point of crypto was neutrality — no entity could prevent you from using it, whether you were paying for a pizza, raising humanitarian aid, or funding an invasion, but the more centralized tech is becoming, it’s also becoming clearer that choosing sides is inevitable.
One thing for sure, for as long as this war drags on, claiming military and civilian casualties and destroying billions in infrastructure, it has taught us that Web3 can be an ally for the side with the smarts to properly deploy it — even though neutrality might soon not be an option anymore. Or as Vitalik Buterin himself put it after condemning Putin on Twitter:
“Reminder: Ethereum is neutral, but I am not.”
