Force Insights |Russia and Ukraine, The War of Crypto?

War does not determine who is right-only who is left.

— Bertrand Russell

The New York Times reported there were 350+ civilians dead since the conflict between Ukraine and Russia erupted into war. Countries around the world are imposing sanctions against Russia over its invasion of Ukraine. The European Union, the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore all imposed sanctions on Moscow.

Despite the sanctions from the above countries to Russia, Ukraine received a lot of support all over the world and most of it are donations received from crypto.

Report from CoinDesk said there are nearly $10M aid raised in ether and bitcoin, with Ethereum wallets alone account for half of the aid received with $5.2M in the account. More are coming, as the number of aids keep increasing.

Crypto has played a huge role here, for the people who love peace and show their care and support for the people of Ukraine. In some way, blockchain technology has borne with a mission to strengthen the premise of global economic freedom through complete decentralization.

Crypto has empowered the progress of building a decentralized finance system that no matter who you are and no matter where you are, that peer to peer transfers can be worked without the involvement of any centralized intermediaries with a minimal transfer fee.

By the Russia and Ukraine case, the amount of aid and funds generated through cryptocurrency has shown the power of what blockchain technology can do. These funds will be extremely helpful for those who were affected.

We have no idea who will get more benefits from this war yet. The point is that we condemn all kinds of war and crypto is not designed to win a war or play a part in it.

People in the blockchain industry have shown their perspective about the conflict.

Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum and a Canadian born with a Russian nationality has condemned Putin’s decision to abandon the peaceful solution and go to war with Ukraine instead.

He added that it was a “crime against the Ukrainian and Russian people” in his twitter.

While at the same time, Juan Benet, the founder of Protocol labs and Filecoin, which is one of the largest decentralized storage networks with tons of NFTs stored within it, has also condemned this behaviour on his twitter.

In the meantime, he also encourages the people who are building web3 for better tech, like to protect human rights, to shield people from despots and attacks, to coordinate, to grow and to prosper together.

Furthermore, Mr. Benet also gave the wakeup call about the internet infrastructure and wars, the role of crypto in the war, if it can protect people suffering from attacks/wars.

As Vitalik said, Ethereum is neutral, people can use it to support the people in Ukraine with millions of crypto assets.

In another way, people can also use it to fight against sanctions on Russia. So, we did see Ukraine’s Ministry of Digital Transformation send out official letters to eight cryptocurrency exchanges, requesting them to stop servicing Russian users because of concerns that digital currencies are being used to evade sanctions.

But responses from Coinbase and Kraken said they won’t be instituting any blanket bans on transactions involving Russian addresses.

Decentralized cryptocurrency exchanges have enabled people to use peer to peer transactions, and crypto has been considered as the foundation of the next generation of internet, and reflection of the value of Web3.

We don’t want crypto to play any role to start a war, crypto is not designed to do so, but the tech is agnostic. People decide the purpose of using the tech, and crypto has no choice here.