Ukraine to Launch NFT Collection Depicting Events From Russia War to Raise More Crypto Funds

Ukraine's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov had last week promised to release non-fungible tokens (NFTs) that will enable the country to raise more funds to help support its armed forces in the ongoing war efforts. Ukraine's Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine on IT industry development, Alex Bornyakov, has now stated that the country will feature art representing news stories about its war with Russia and sell them as NFTs. Bornyakov had tweeted last week that the funds raised through crypto so far has helped the country buy thousands of bulletproof vests, packed lunches, medicine items, and other supplies for the armed forces.

As per a statement by Bornyakov to The Guardian, the country is creating an NFT collection which will be “like a museum of the Russian-Ukraine war. We want to tell the world in NFT format.” Bornyakov said that each NFT in the collection will harbour a piece of art that tells a story from a trusted news source. "We want it to be cool, good-looking, and it takes time," he added.

The Ukrainian government announced an NFT project on March 3 after cancelling airdrops for those who donated crypto to the government. "We will announce NFTs to support Ukrainian Armed Forces soon," Mykhailo Fedorov said in a tweet, without giving any further details of the project.

NFTs have become increasingly popular over the past year, but they are now gaining a unique use case with the Ukrainian government has received overwhelming support from the cryptocurrency community, with more than $76 million (roughly Rs. 580 crore) donated in different cryptocurrencies, as per blockchain security firm SlowMist.

One of the donated digital assets to the Ukrainian cause so far is a CryptoPunk NFT valued at over $200,000 (roughly Rs. 1.5 crore). CryptoPunk NFTs are some of the most valuable collections, and the Ukrainian government is yet to sell them.

While crypto activity in Ukraine has skyrocketed as people look for alternative ways of saving their funds, trading activities have also spiked in Russia.

However, Russia has faced heavy sanctions from numerous countries causing the Russian Ruble to fall to numerous all-time lows within the past two weeks, which resulted in Russian residents looking for alternative ways of storing their wealth.

Cryptocurrency exchanges have said that they will comply with the sanctions and block the accounts of sanctioned Russian individuals and entities. However, most of the leading exchanges, including Binance, Coinbase and Kraken, have said that they will not impose a unilateral ban on all Russian users without the legal authorisation to do so since such action goes against crypto's censorship-resistance rationale.

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