The Ukrainian government has recently announced that its Aid for Ukraine crypto fundraising campaign has sold a donated Cryptopunk NFT and secured more than $100,000 to support the country’s war efforts against Russia.
Earlier in March, the Cryptopunk NFT with the token ID 5364 was donated to the crypto fund of Ukraine. And only yesterday, this NFT was sold by the fund to an unknown buyer for 90 Ethereum (ETH).
The Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine, Alex Bornyakov, announced this through Twitter. The office takes care of the nation’s wartime crypto fundraising.
Crypto And NFT Donations: Big Aid For Ukraine’s War Effort
Cryptocurrencies have played a significant role while Ukraine has been dealing with the war and has helped the country manage resources, military supplies, etc. Supposedly, the nation has secured more than $135 Million in digital assets via crypto donations and sales of donated NFTs.
In the month of March, a crypto group raised approximately $6.75 Million for the war efforts through a sale of a single NFT which was the Flag of Ukraine. Furthermore, many such instances in which NFTs were used for massive funds have helped the invaded country.
Originally the crypto funds are not really held or spent by the government of Ukraine. In Fact, the Ukrainian crypto exchange Kuna is the entity that operates the fund’s treasury, which is utilized to help fund the purchases of the volunteers.
Since the war between Russia and Ukraine has started, crypto has unveiled a different potential of itself. It has proven to be a potentially beneficial form of finance amidst the geopolitical crisis as it became nearly impossible for the citizens to access traditional money.
Although previously, in April, the International Monetary Fund warned that Russia could escape economic sanctions by mining cryptocurrencies. But Jenet Yellen, the US Treasury Secretary, highlighted that such a practice had not been widely observed, though.
But lately, the crypto market has seen varied bearish trends and has plummeted significantly. As the Cryptopunks NFTs are built atop the Ethereum network, while ETH is down by nearly 70% in the last ten weeks, it has quite affected the fundraising potential through NFT collections.
This Cryptopunk sale generated $100,000 currently, but if we talk about March when it was donated. It would have cost approximately $267,000 or more.
As of writing, the second largest crypto asset, Ethereum (ETH), is exchanging hands at $1,168 with a market cap of $141,719,315,093 and is up by about 4% in the last twenty-four hours.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2022/06/21/ukraine-raises-100k-in-ethereum-via-sale-of-donated-cryptopunk-nft/