The Wave of Ukrainian Donations: Crypto Transforming Charity & Philanthropy

Transcript

well first my name is fernando gutierrez i'm a member of the crypto valuation for a few years and i'll be i will be moderating this panel um we have four amazing guests as everyone knows by now on february 24th russia invaded ukraine and completely changed the perception of certain things for everyone and no one thought a full war could be in the books in europe and it is and that raised also also a huge wave of help up to a point because also there's been a lot of inaction

but uh specifically in the crypt world there was a lot of uh attention brought to the conflict the uh ukrainian uh government and some other non-gov and non-governmental organizations they were already very crypto sabi and they started to raise funds using a crypto and asking for donations in crypto and that was completely unprecedented having a government asking for for this kind of funds so far more than 100 millions have been raised which is amazing according to alex bonikov the deputy minister of digital transformation who was already doing a lot of great work before

before the invasion so it's not everything didn't start right away in that minute so those funds weren't a big part of the government but also to other organizations now they are being deployed change [Music] the opinion of a lot of people around crypto in fact this event came uh came to be because some people were complaining about a crypto being used for uh evading sanctions and uh i grew up that also it was used for great things like bringing all this money to a train and um i think that's a very interesting conversation to have because i think this is much more real than the other danger that some people um talk about so

without further ado our our guests um i i see them from from left to right so i'll go with yes with that at first max income uh ceo of um sexy that does a compliance and blockchain forensics so maxine welcome thank you very much for being here you could really introduce yourself and your company that'd be great um sure thanks a lot um yeah as you said my name is maxime and i'm the ceo of chexy czech c is a compliance consultancy company but with specific focus on blockchain analytics and blockchain forensics so we also have developed our own tool

that aggregates the results of multiple different providers on the blockchain analytics space into one user interface or api api that's roughly thank you then emily fasila from the giving block which builds tools to facilitate donations mostly for ngos in crypto so welcome emily thank you for being here if you would also do a brief intro yeah thank you so much for having me as you've said the giving block enables nonprofits to accept over 70 different types of cryptocurrency and we have over a thousand non-profits around the globe

so really happy to be here and part of this discussion today awesome uh then um alona sevchenko um founder of ukraine dao which has raised i think about uh seven million dollars uh for for different has also created a huge organization of volunteers that are involved in many aspects besides yes raising raising money alana welcome hey everyone my name is elona i am um ukrainian i'm based in london and i co-founded with my friends um co-founded ukraine dao three days before the invasion on the 21st of february and the original idea was to

provide some help to volunteer networks on the ground in ukraine a lot of a lot of them have been accepting crypto for years ukraine is extremely digitally advanced and it's very it's a very crypto friendly country uh but then it very quickly expanded into a lot of other aspects of our work that i can uh talk about briefly at a later point of this conversation but we are very honored to be here perfect thank you and last but not least uh andrey cava who owns a development company he's based in ukraine so he has the most first-hand account of everything that is happening

over there and he's also raised some funds have some incidents around that so andre thank you for being here uh thanks fernando uh as you have said my name is uh andrey howard for short advertising um but is unpronounceable i am a developer for aegis i am i guess could be called bitcoin energy since we have uh integrated the current payments for our clients in 2011 or something like this uh for last uh five years i with a small team have developed supported and developed

an electron wallet for their protocol and recently we switched to more lightning development and since i'm in ukraine i am i really first had experience with what's going on here on the ground perfect thank you so now what we're going to do instead of doing the typical formatting panels where i do a question everyone answers it i think in order to be able to cover more ground and we're going to be structuring the event in two parts one part more focus on the specific racing uh specific

experience of alana and andre and then we go to more broader uh discussion with emily and maxim but of course everyone please feel free to uh speak at any time uh i'm sure even if it's not your main focus of experience everyone has interesting things to say about everything so the first thing i think it's um we can either start with alona or andre whatever you prefer but if you could briefly describe your uh fundraising effort how it worked the amounts and all that i think maybe alona is a bit more uh

um it's a good start uh because c ray so much is it's a happy story so uh let's start with the happy note and then we can move to to andre which had some more incidents around his experience can i just clarify what exactly um you'd like me to address like how how it happened yeah how how the ukraine now uh came to existence and how you've raised funds and how much and what you are doing with those funds um i think that that gives a very good context for the discussion after so it started as a telegram group with

two of my friends from that i knew through my work in free rosedale freemastar is its aim is to help release ross albrecht the creator of the silk road website from prison he's serving a double life sentence for 40 years with no right to parole and so that's that was the project where i was working with his friends his family is uh very much involved with us um so we were you know working to raise awareness about his case because the only the only avenue that he's left unfortunately is presidential pardon so it's a super complicated case um and that is how i came about to

know people from please a doubt that eventually they helped me form ukraine down so in the weeks preceding the invasion i was having a really um tough time obviously and i kept going to protest and uh posting about it online like trying to explain to everyone around me how dangerous the situation was but unfortunately obviously not everyone thought that it was going to get like this you know even obviously like i i thought it was good that i thought the invasion was going to happen but i could not in my worst nightmares even comprehend

at that time exactly the scale of it um and so my friends um at some point they pulled me into this uh video called back to you was and he was like he kind of like he was like i really think you should start like an online community um for ukraine and so i set up this group chat on telegram there was three people in there me and uh steve and matthew and i was uh i basically said to them hey guys i'm thinking i'm i'm starting to consider creating ukraine doubt i will uh you know kind of mobilize the community to support valencia networks in ukraine that take that except crypto

and so that's how it started and then on the night of the invasion when i saw what was happening on my friends from hartley messaged me and then i went on twitter saw that pretty much every major city in ukraine was getting bombed called my parents kind of essentially had to say goodbye to them because you you know in that at that time you don't know what's going to happen by the morning um we didn't know if you would have like you know mobile reception but by the morning so yeah people who said goodbye to each other and um i can't remember the next four days uh everything is kind of like uh my memories are very like blurred of from

that time but i obviously dropped some message in the group chat and stephen met you they started pulling in people from the website community people that they knew and i wasn't paying attention to what was happening in that book chat because that was the least of my concerns at the time you know and so that day i went to the protest and when i was at the protest i they asked me to join this video for and i i said to them like i'm on outside downing streets like are you sure you need me there and they were like yeah we definitely need you there and so i joined the poll and there was like 20 people there i very like i didn't know most of them

and they were talking about some nft and uh i just said hello to them i spoke to them for like five minutes and i went you know um get on with my uh miserable day and so and then by the time i got home i opened the discord that i set up on the 21st of february and it was like a a full-blown like vibrant community there you know there was like 30 channels and i didn't create any of them there were like mods and moderators some walls they were setting up the different things to talk about and that's when i realized because i'm familiar with daoist i you know was working basically full time as the dark

contributor before that and i saw a constitution how constitution tower formed and how active it was and a couple other ones and i i knew at that moment that it was it was going to become a thing that is beyond my control now but at the same time over the first few days i have to tell you most of the work that was done over those first days in terms of work on the dow and on the one like the fundraising kind of um side of things i was very involved in that because there were so many people messaging me from ukraine because they they were like okay there is this like

huge big twitter account and there it follows 10 people one of them is ukrainian i'm going to message the person for some help and so and other people message me offering help and so i spend the bus um for a day that didn't sleep at all and uh i was kind of like trying to connect the people who who needed something with the people who were like offering uh whatever help they could provide and so the nft of the ukrainian flag that was um it was auctioned on party bid i was actually i was barely involved in uh in that at all so that was in a true dow fashion the power was decentralized um

you know i would like join some sort of spaces and people would say alona like you've raised like you've helped raise for a million dollars and i was like yeah i mean i literally have no idea how that happened like i'm sure you have more uh more merit that you traded yourself with but um yeah the beauty of of these movements is probably that decentralization and crypto providing the tools to be able to do this for for those who are not fully aware of the effort what uh the ukraine dow the u.s auction uh and nft and everyone could contribute if i'm wrong please correct me of the ukrainian

flag and you raised several thousand if and um and then you are donating those funds for a big part of those funds to other organizations and then all the part you are using for your own uh work right so we have donated over from the first uh from the first round of distribution and the the last one um we haven't done the next one yet from at that time we donated most of our uh funds to come back alive which is the most is the the beloved ngo uh for ukrainians they support

um the ukrainian armed forces mostly it's the humanitarian um equipment kind of equipment that they purchase for them for our defenders and so um also about a million dollars worth of ether we transferred to the ukrainian uh ukrainians ukrainian government's official uh crypto wallet um then also we made uh quite a significant donation to our trade which is uh an lgbt charity uh supporting um queer lgbtqi people in ukraine who are struggling uh they often have issues that

you know that straight people don't necessarily anticipate um they don't um face them and obviously in terms of like treatment by uh in russia you know um russia doesn't have a great uh track record with the the lgbt community so that is a that kind of it adds a whole new layer to that related stress and so then also yeah there were a couple of other donations to the uh to a charity that provides mental health support and so on so um yeah those um those were the the main things that we focus on and the reason why we donated to come back alive the reason why that was the priority to

give them the biggest um chunk of funds that we had was because in ukraine if you ask if you speak to ukrainian people that's that's what they are that's the kind of support that they would be asking you know every person i was speaking to they and myself included we were all like we need to support our army right now you know so if you want to help someone you need to ask um what what kind of help do you need you know because not everyone in the in the western countries understands why why ukrainians would be so passionate about that but if there is no you know it's super important to support

ukraine's defenders because they are the only thing that's shielding us from um the atrocities that the russian army has brought to ukraine so it's a it's a huge honor for us to support them we incorporate with them very closely to this day so yeah i mean i i i hope that answers addresses the question i'm sorry no i think that that gives us a lot of context and how things came to be one one follow-up question on that i think you said you properly set up a dial using the aragon uh protocol right or you were about to do it no it's very we are in the process of building up our structure or our governance decision making processes we are writing

up uh documentation right now we speak to a lot of other dow leaders for advice we read a lot of stuff as well to kind of educate ourselves and the advice that we found very useful that some people gave to us um was that do not try to solve every problem at once and obviously you're operating in very um dire circumstances i'm lucky to be in london but a lot of ukraine our contributors are in ukraine and they are working literally working from bomb shelters so things don't necessarily um happen as uh fast as they would be otherwise but um to me the most important thing is are we making an impact that's in line with our

mission and i know that we are and if we if we don't have um an amazing properly um completely written out documentation yet but i'm okay with it as long as we are things like surviving probably are more important than that makes sense thank you very much so uh andre your experience i i i i've known andrew for for a few years because we're both involved in the gas project so i'm a bit more familiar with what's happened uh but it's it's it's a bit more uh bittersweet because in in in ukraine's case it creates the okay you see the good of the people donating and

organizing and all that and andre you you you had a kind of different experience when you started making people aware of the situation in ukraine right yeah yeah so uh let me first give some background work for me this is not the first war i am in uh at least not the first proxy war i uh my 16th birthday was on 1991 when uh there was a attempted coup in soviet union uh i've been participating in first maidan in 2004

i have been actively participating in second mandan in 2013 14. so um i kind of kind of was prepared at least i thought i i knew what to expect yet when me and my wife and our children were woke up at uh 4 a.m um on february 21st by explosions in bristol near uh international airport nearby um yeah you you can imagine that uh the previous world uh ended for us um so um

i i will try not to tell uh lengthy story but uh just to get the idea our government uh did what typical bureaucratic structure does the first action was to uh impose um merkel law of course uh second was to impose some censorship and third one was to block all international trade so from that night until now and i guess at least until the world will land uh

the only four yeah i guess foreign that can uh legally buy and uh buy dollars and euros in ukraine are the four government entities um uh several more organizations so um if that would be um if there would be no crypto then i'm sorry but uh plans of russia would be executed almost closely uh unfortunately for them unfortunately for us we have crypto so uh immediately we have a

quite close the uh relationship in our cryptic community and we have a closed chat for 400 something people in ukraine and uh we saw what is going on and we collectively started doing fundraising and uh putin financing our army and our defense efforts through crypto so fast forward on the background right now almost all non-governmental help is done by crypto

since you can't transfer dollars out from ukraine you can't bring dollars euros in ukraine so fundraising is done almost entirely in crypto and it is bought in ukraine for brimnes sold on international markets you are buying supplies both uh and uh for our army and territorial defense and uh moving to ukraine uh about me personally and my team um while our community was raising literally

millions during first days me and my small team we thought what can we do and since we have been at the moment of the maintainers of electron bullet for dash we decided as a team collectively uh to put a single message and uh on march 4 first we released a planet update with um all planet fixes and improvements and uh with one single small addition every time you start the wallet both desktop and mobile one

you get a pop-up notice that on 4 am february 21st russian army bombed our cities and people and if you would like to help us fight back here's the address of the site where you can donate both to army and humanitarian staffers love ukraine and uh that was it i knew what could be the price of this shot but um as little as we could do i had to do it

it was accepted by uh my team one hundred percent in minnesota uh so uh fernando i don't know how much detail you would like to know about the story uh or our listeners but uh it wasn't uh that good experience unfortunately yeah i i i i i can summarize uh because i i i follow the story uh basically a lot of people in the community started complaining about the developer the developing team not being neutral and bringing such a topic into the wallet they

thought that was not a good idea because there were also russian users who could be offended by the message so in the end the team was funded by a governance proposal directly from the das protocol and that movement from some users got bigger they boycotted everything and they ended up defunding the team under the uh excuse that cryptos would be neutral and they've broken neutrality and i i also must say that there were a lot of people supporting the message and the team and people

saying uh how can you say that they broke the truck that they need to stay neutral when they are being bombed while they code so it makes no sense but i think i wanted to bring this up even if it's not a very good image because around all these movement of seeing opportunists and also [Music] trying to take advantage of all these uh fundraising efforts and i've also seen these uh neutrality topic come up uh many times so i think it's it's uh it's good there's a good entry point to to ask everyone i think in this case everyone has probably has an opinion about neutrality and crypto being neutral

neutral or not or i think as any movement i mean there's people with different opinions that's fine we don't only it's online but i think any one of you have anything to say about this that would be great um let me summarize by a point [Music] it's um it was for me very hard to stay neutral when uh there is a literary artillery duel happening within 10 kilometers in my house and i'm here with my wife my four children and uh and i i i know what's happening with my friends in kharkiv mariupol

her son and nicolai and it's it's um then you you you can't be natural uh on such things when uh people are uh killed mindlessly and it's clear for anyone that um that had eyes and ears that it won't end it it wants to play and it's not a local contractor anymore um i i i won't dive deeply on this topic but a protocol can and should be nato people should not be people should stand strong strongly for their beliefs

and fight for them and pay the full price that's it anyone else want to add up on the neutrality topic i am first of all i'm extremely sorry to hear that this happened it's always very i i kind i see this um sentiment a lot every pretty much every day because i engage with the people on twitter unfortunately very often and uh to me like this concept of neutrality in in the face of uh genocide it's uh it's the absolute

like it's it's not it's not pacifism it's there is nothing um gracious or there is nothing benevolent about watching someone being brutally abused like that and uh staying neutral uh just see seeing that that is happening and so yeah that is um that is the the fastest way to to make me get mad is to tell or tell ukrainians we're still told that every day that we should be um neutral or that we are not getting help from someone because they're neutral or you know again i don't i can have a i can give you a three-hour ted

talk about this but it's just absolutely outrageous you know uh humans should not be neutral why should why should we just like quietly uh suffer from this you know and see ukrainians all this obviously again i'm i'm lucky i'm in the uk i've been here for been living here for years but my whole family is is there and when you call your dad and um he's like you you try to explain to him how to turn how to adjust the security settings on his phone so that uh russians don't intercept his scores and stuff and you hear the the siren going off and he's like he can't find

his glasses and he's trying to do this stuff that you're asking him it's um and then he's and then he just hangs up um it's um it's it's uh i wouldn't wish this on on my worst enemy you know and how the how are you supposed to be um neutral um what kind of person you would be if you were okay with that and if you didn't try to fight for your loved ones but yeah again i'm not i'm not gonna have a go on a dungeon here um you know you know my you know my views on that okay so before moving on because i i want to touch on more general things that

another maxim can comes out a lot i have one last question uh probably andrew has already answered a lot about this i would like to know if besides crypto as a donation vehicle is there an additional utility for crypto in ukraine right now i've read reports of a lot of equipment bought with crypto to foreign players because of those uh financial uh controls that are in place um but also in the day-to-day in people in their day-to-day lives is there any use for crypto besides donations is is there a bigger role or is it as a fundraising tool

well i i i can tell from firsthand experience again since i am my small village almost lost its internet connection a couple of times and i'm involved in all that uh logistics stuff um unfortunately not yet because on the buying side when we buy some equipment most players would like to be paid in dollars or euros if they would accept crypto it would be much simpler and faster if we could uh do a transaction in literally uh

hours instead of for days and weeks so on that side uh the limitation is uh revelation uh in the context of the registration in ukraine um i guess i'm not sure but i guess there was a backup plan in the case of losing connectivity to try to bring something [Music] basically it would be the same uh fiat currency but on uh completely new rails uh kind of uh for lighting protocol and uh fast

payments um that would work even in case when um the internet connection isn't stable and [Music] you have outages for hours or in days um [Music] uh here locally um crypto is used mostly to fundraise and transfer funds and uh again because um people here are not accustomed to debate in a volatile currency if we would have um really cheap and fast uh stable coin you know like ukrainian green or

american dollar i guess it could get some acceptance but uh not the time okay that's that's interesting that that was what i was fearing sometimes when people uh are super optimistic in crypto media about how much things have changed and all that you can suspect that we are all doing some useful thinking but of course i mean connectivity in a war zone or any disaster zone in a more broader sense it's an issue and crypto still needs to solve that which brings me to uh tooling uh emily you've been building tools for non-government

organizations to do um uh precisely what uh it's been it's been done there what can you tell us about the tools available what are the bigger challenges but in situations i mean there's no recent situations like ukraine but um there are others in disaster relief that this uh the iti i think there was a big fundraise also there were there were some crises where crypto has played some role what are the common challenges you see from those situations you've worked on what with what you've heard now in ukraine and what are the solutions what could we be doing to give crypto a broader utility

yeah that's a really good question i i will start by saying so much incredible work has been done by the crypto community already to support um a number of needs in ukraine so on february 24th we were really inspired by the ngos that we do work with because they started issuing their responses what they were going to do and so we created the ukraine emergency response fund it has raised over 4.6 million since february 24th and it's supporting over 30 of our ngos that are working in a number of areas hunger relief medical supplies refugee services policy legal and law support um and even

animals in the arts so i think um to watch their work and how quickly they were responding and how quickly the community uh the crypto community responded as well it was really inspiring for us and very motivating for us to continue to push forward and work even more closely with these organizations i think in moments of tragedy you always ask yourself what can i do about this and our team was very you know grateful to know that we had non-profit organizations that were making an impact on the ground and we could turn to that right away and i think it's something that we need to continue to push forward

right one of our um incredible ngos international crisis group is working with heads of government and policymakers to open those pathways to peace so this work spans from you know hot meals to really um urgently trying to bring this war to an end and i think what we were talking about in the first few days how much action and activity was around this we can't lose that uh momentum really i think we i i know that we need to continue to very urgently um fund these organizations a lot of our organizations will distribute funds to other local partners so alana was talking about how the lgbtqia community is seeing

unique issues in this war one of our partners outright international has distributed over half a million dollars to 34 local local partners working on just that and so i think for us from our perspective we just want to keep that momentum keep that fund going and and continue to see people's awareness increase about um what they can do and and their action follow that in the crypto community great so to understand a bit better what would you do so you work with ngos that you've previously um uh approached and you give them the

tools to fundraise in crypto but then you give them fiat or you give them crypto and they do or you have the combination how does that work yeah that's a great question so we typically help them fundraise in crypto and then move it to fiat for immediate response in whatever um wherever they are we do have some of our partners like care who has also had response providing food shelter blankets um water cash in in ukraine and surrounding countries um care actually has some programming where they do issue crypto vouchers it's so some of our non-profits will um have

the crypto converted and then actually put that back into programming and and use crypto in that way but the typical model for most of our nonprofits is um fundraising in cryptocurrency moving it to fiat and then continuing to provide those services on on a more massive scale right we've seen um such a a lot of our nonprofits have seen a huge increase in their fundraising from being able to accept cryptocurrency alone and then also the decentralized nature of it they're seeing an increase in where their support is coming from um and an increase in awareness of what the of the work that they do overall so it's um

it's really special for us to just be part of this we technically are that product solution to allow them to do so and really streamline this process but we also provide that guidance in crypto philanthropy which is quite a new sector but um our it is our goal to make crypto the the crypto community the most philanthropic community um in the world and they've shown us that you know they they are meeting us there so there right so um well we've been talking about tens of millions maybe 100 millions moving around by entities sometimes not fully formed yet

and these funds are moving internationally so i'm guessing if maxim who is the compliance guy has already nightmares or or he's going to have them later might say what are the challenges i mean for i guess exchanges when all these funds move around and because in the end we're seeing that basically it's a fundraising tool and then people convert that to fiat to to spend it so in the end that point of exchange the changes i guess they need to do some controls but they also can't do that much so i mean what what are you seeing in in this space from from your point of view

well i'm not sure about nightmares um not all the exchanges get nightmares from this situation and uh i think this this brings us again a little bit to this neutrality point that we uh talked about uh before the technology is there for everybody and uh so so the wallets that are created that can be uh well where you can donate money to those are operated by places that are fine accepting donations from across the globe and i was looking into the the wallets created by the government um where more than 60 million dollars worth of different

cryptocurrencies uh arrived and you really can see transactions from across the globe from a coin base to a uh bitcoin de and the germany to a nigerian exchange from anything [Music] people are sending money to those wallets they belong to kuna a ukrainian company and they are obviously fine accepting any kind of funds coming to them and why i mentioned uh neutrality is that not only good guys can use the technology and to continue our good news bad news uh situation i want to bring up to the attention that

there are obviously as in any kind of crypto um well let's let's say hype uh there is always some bad actors jumping on it and there are countless fake wallets created out there to imitate like they're raising funds for ukraine or for good purposes but they're not and those are the obvious ones but there are less obvious ones which i find very interesting and examples would be um well big news was that the ukrainian government wallet received a crypto punk nft worth hundreds of thousands

a few days later the same wallet receives a fake crypto punk nft like something that looks like a crypto punk but is not uh where is basically worthless and um that creates many different interesting situations so that creates uh some kind of um charge back to the creators of it once those crypto punks become available again while because they were sold by the government they are trusted and so the whole collection becomes trusted but the whole collection is actually just a fake um scenario that this or should be worthless

um or also they can be uh um rewards sent back to the creator of nft that those kind of scenarios are possible so there are so many special cases of bad actors um be part of it the ukrainian government announced that they will be doing an airdrop of some ukrainian tokens like hours after that someone sent tokens they were called peaceful world tokens to all wallets that have been previously sending funds

to the ukrainian government wallets like free giveaways but those um tokens were actually worthless and were actually just creating some kind of a a hook for people to get uh scammed even more and so so there's a crazy different things in all directions going on and we need to be again aware of the situation that the technology is neutral everyone can use it good guys bad guys and when we do we want to do something good we need to make sure that we are sending it to the right places and uh i am obviously totally for

decentralized donations and dows and raising funds in a once international decentral uh approach but um yeah people need to be be careful and they need to do their research even here it's it's like investing in something new this also brings me to the topic of um sanctions because a lot of people have been talking about hey crypto could be a tool used by russians to evade sanctions which i mean to a point i i guess there could be a few transactions there that would look sadie but that also um but i mean there is a lot of studies around

that alone assert with me an article talking about the liquidity i mean if oligarchs wanted to was their fortunes through crypto there would not be enough crypto in the world for them to evade sanctions uh that was a great article but there's also been calls by officials in the ukrainian government for western exchanges to block russian accounts and exchanges and exchanges pushing back saying hey we can't do that with the court order because i mean these are wallets from private citizens um and even if some could be tied to the world we don't have a monday to do that we

can't do that legally so what are your views around around that do you think there will be a pushback somehow against well again the the blockchain technology is neutral so anyone can use it even russian oligarchs um i have been working with many crypto exchanges in the past and all of them have something in place to make sure that uh wallets that are flagged as bad are blocked whenever they uh whenever the res exchange receives money from that kind of wallet so if international

politicians would decide to ban certain wallets that are probably belonging to russian oligarchs all exchanges would support them and freeze those funds this is for sure all exchanges that would still send funds to those uh wallets they would be taken down within days because everyone could see that so that that is the transparency of the blockchain so there is actually a good part of it um but the russian oligarchs they are smart and they are professionals in

like flying below the radar and i would not say laundering money but yes laundering money um through shell companies international companies set up anywhere in the world under fake names or uh with with some people in between so if russian oligarchs would want to move money they don't need crypto to do that and it's the the difficulties for the traditional banks and for cryptocurrencies to identify those shell structures and and make sure that they are understanding the purpose of the transaction those

shell companies are doing and yes the sheer volume of russian oligarchs trying to move money would be a problem for the crypto ecosystem so there are probably russian oligarchs or just russian rich people or other russian people moving crypto in this very second and this is fine for everybody but this is not the type of sanctions that the world is hoping for perfect thank you so we are approaching the the hour so i would like to finish on a positive note called for action however you want to call it

so i'd like to uh ask a question to to all of you what could crypto be doing to help more in a situation like the ukrainian invasion but also in other situations that have some similarity i think we've heard good things about crypto today uh but also some limitations so what do you guys think uh the community the industry should be working on in order to improve things be it for fundraising but also for other things i mean i know ukrainian dao ukraine adele is doing a lot of work besides fundraising

and for that maybe more tooling for dows or easier setup could do easier governance so you can control all those areas of work or maybe it's uh easier conversions or it's tools for uh an offline situation so any ideas you guys have please let's let's finish it with that call to action whoever wants to start if not i'll choose someone randomly okay would you like for me to start hey let's

go okay okay so um michael to action uh short term um right now um i'm sorry but uh the most uh the largest thing that we need right now is money is donations that would help us to buy uh humanitarian and uh um non-humanitarian equipment um by in your countries because uh ukraine at the moment has almost zero military production and uh humanitarian stuff too so by uh donating to help ukraine you will have to help your country because your producers will

uh will get this money finally me term uh please push hard push as hard as we do with russians to your regulators um crypto is a free wolf and uh let this freedom uh stay there um click create um simple and clear regulation framework for um any legal entity to so it could be able to accept hold and sell cryptocurrency uh i mean legal entity not just a near

an anonymous person on the internet so it could be a part of bigger financial and trade network and long term uh let's let's create more and better technologies that would be even better resistant to attempt to censor uh be it political censorship or technological censorship in times of war because when your optical cables are destroyed by bombing

this is also censorship let's do technology that would allow everyone on the planet to live produce and trade under even most extreme cases that's that that's quite at least yeah i know i know i i you could keep a few people busy with with so much homework uh to one of the points that the raising more uh we'll send an email uh probably tomorrow with uh some of the addresses of the organization we thought we've been talking uh about today so every attendant can uh they won't donate

because it's true that there was a big influx of donations in the early days but if you check the blockchain it's gone down a lot there's still a few initiatives yesterday someone serving me and nft drop at openc by the u.s artists that it was working with the core organization which helps refugees and they raise some money but but it's gone down a lot and it is the same thing probably done with the war in the news the first few days everyone is obsessed about it and then it fades away so probably it's important that it doesn't fade away and keep people keep doing it so we will add a few addresses and ideas from from the guests today in that email we'll send everyone and we'll also put that in comments in a youtube

video um so more ideas anyone um i know there are many i can be i can go next if you want i think uh a lot of people are very suspicious of crypto in in general like i deal with some people who are more open-minded when i tell them about ukraine dao and i i hope to think that ukraine dark and with its own with the example its own existence kind of helps change that negative public perception which is i mean some of some of those concerns are obviously fair but they are in my opinion they're very much

exaggerated um but there are so many amazing applications of blockchain in in general that can be used uh we've been working with the projects called journal dao and they are work they are working they are developing this this tool apart from one of one of them is um they want to implement uh a cert like a product it's a it's going to operate as a dao as well uh that will allow independent journalists to monetize their content uh without an intermediary without having to pay um any subscription fee to the

platform so that could potentially give them the the freedom and the the autonomy rights that they wouldn't otherwise have so i actually just spoke to mustafa nayam uh he's a a very well-known ukrainian journalist and uh one of one of uh euro my dance leaders and he's a it's uh he knows a lot of journalists so i just told him about this project and we're going to see if we can find journalists in on the ground in ukraine that are willing to test um this technology but yeah that's that just one of um one one of the examples but there are very exciting

opportunities of how blockchain can be applied and some of them we haven't even come up with them yet sounds like a challenge for the even block emily because it's like another application of hey let's make it easy for journalists in this case to get funded with a nic interface because i'm sure many of them are not keep this happening absolutely and that's what a lot of our clients are doing and i think that would be my call to action for the crypto community is just understanding the impact that you can have we have a movement that we call crypto is good and spreading the word to not only the crypto community overall but also um people who maybe are a

little bit afraid of crypto which sometimes does include our ngos but to maxim's point earlier we use chain analysis software we only take registered ngos onto our platform to really protect any of those um scams or maybe you're giving money where the response isn't there and when we created our ukraine emergency response fund we made sure that each organization added to that fund had a plan of action in place and then they have been sharing with us details of how they're helping so i think overall for the crypto community just understanding how much of an impact you really can have um and that crypto is good

cool thank you maxime you'll last any idea you think we could improve on as a industry or community to help in this situation i'll just uh repeat what andre said we need clearer regulation and we need a better regulation um not only in general for for uh crypto but also a regulation that will help the banks to understand what crypto is and how to deal with crypto companies especially with dows because if a real dow that is not registered anywhere you cannot get a bank account and i guess that will be a

problem at some point and it now registered somewhere which is a a legal wrapper it's possible but still even there some banks will have problems to even understand the concept so if there will be clearer regulation there will be better possibilities for the crypto projects to to thrive over time and regulation is not always making things harder it sometimes help people to understand the risks and manage those thank you okay so i think if anyone else has something to to say before we wrap up any call any

thing you want to mention that is important if not uh we'll wrap up we are just on top of the hour but we started two minutes late so we nailed it just one hour as promised uh i i want to respect all your time i want to thank uh everyone who all the guests um for the for being here also all the people who attended all the people who are watching this in youtube after we we published um we wanted to raise some visibility on on this part of crypto that i think it's sometimes uh missed on the hype of uh trading and valuations and things like that but there is a good aspect of crypto that can help in situations like this and that's what we wanted to bring

here i hope it's been entertaining and insightful and everyone has learned as much as i have and with that thank you very much and see you in another occasion thank you everyone thank you