: Ukraine Received More Than M in Crypto Donations. Here’s Where It’s Going #WorldNEWS Indre Viltrakyte remembers what it means to live under Soviet rule. From a winter getaway in Bali with her

Ukraine Received More Than M in Crypto Donations. Here’s Where It’s Going #WorldNEWS
Indre Viltrakyte remembers what it means to live under Soviet rule. From a winter getaway in Bali with her family, the Lithuanian watched the news last week with impending gloom. A fashion designer turned renegade web3 creator, Viltrakyte is no stranger to the contentious politics of Eastern Europe; she was entangled in a 2013 lawsuit against her native Lithuania over free speech in her brands advertising, which ultimately went to the European Court of Human Rights. (She won. ) The NFT project she now helms is even appropriately called The Rebels. But Putin’s advancement into Ukraine hit close to home in new ways. Because of the time difference, she was awake to watch Russia’s invasion unfold. “It was just like—devastating news,” she says. “The first thought that came to me was, How can we help? Because they will need help. ”
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After getting in touch with Ukrainian friends and connections, she started by converting about ,000 in Ethereum to Bitcoin and donating personally to SaveLife. in. UA, or Come Back Alive, a Ukraine-based military charity that accepts BTC; it was the main group she could find that already had a public cryptocurrency wallet set up. Viltrakyte was not alone in her eagerness to contribute crypto to the Ukrainian cause. By Tuesday, the amount of crypto raised for Ukraine-based aid had surpassed million, across a number of funds and efforts. One group even raised the equivalent of million in a mere 30 seconds.
In Kyiv, Vitaliy Deynega, founder of Come Back Alive, is hard at work managing the many millions of dollars that are flowing into his organization’s coffers. A well-recognized Ukrainian charity with over 3 million followers on Facebook, his group buys equipment for the army: radios, drones, thermal night-vision setups. They set up an open crypto wallet about a year ago, and with the influx in support over the past week—both in crypto and fiat currency—they’ve already bought thousands of pieces of equipment for immediate distribution. “It was not that popular,” Deynega says of the crypto option in the past. “Not all that useful. But right now, in this hot stage of the war, it is extremely useful. ” Sometimes, they don’t even have to convert the crypto to Euros, but can make purchases directly. Transacting solely in digital currency is not new to Ukrainians; Deynega references a banking system that supports transferring funds between bank cards. “Now instead of this banking card thing, we have this crypto thing, which gives us more flexibility because its international,” he says.