- Ukraine's government has set up a polkadot wallet for donations to fund the country's defense against Russia.
- The country started accepting bitcoin, ethereum and tether on Friday, a day after Russia's invasion started.
- Donations to its wallets have reached almost $25 million as of Tuesday, according to Elliptic threat intel.
The Ukrainian government tweeted on Tuesday that it will now accept crypto donations via the polkadot network, as they added a dot wallet address, and said they would add more tokens soon.
"The people of Ukraine are grateful for the support and donations from the global crypto community as we protect our freedom. We are now accepting Polkadot donations too," the post read.
Polkadot is one of the top 20 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization and currently has a market value of almost $18.8 billion, according to CoinMarketCap.
At the time of writing, the dot token was trading at $19.37, having gained over 14% on the day. Since the start of this year, it's gained 33%, compared to bitcoin's roughly 7% increase.
—Ukraine / Україна (@Ukraine) March 1, 2022
Polkadot bills itself as the internet of blockchains and looks to solve the scalability problem faced by many networks while charging lower transaction fees. It was originally launched on ethereum, its founder also co-founded ethereum, in 2017, but after issues with the network polkadot branched out in 2019.
Ukraine called for donations last Friday, asking people to send either bitcoin, ethereum or tether. Throughout the weekend donations flooded in and blockchain analytics firm Elliptic said that almost $25 million had been received in crypto asset donations so far.
"The Ukrainian government – and NGOs providing support to the military – have raised $24.6 million through more than 26,000 crypto asset donations since the start of the Russian invasion," Elliptic said earlier on Tuesday.
GlobalBlock analyst Marcus Sotiriou noted the impact of this on cryptocurrency prices in his market note on Tuesday.
"I think the increase in publicity for crypto as an alternative settlement method has been positive overall. This is because millions of dollars have been donated to Ukraine through crypto," he said.
While Sotiriou also pointed out the significance of the cryptocurrency donations.
"This marks a historical moment - the first time that a government has raised money via crypto at scale. The negatives being discussed are clearly outweighed by the power of crypto to act as a solution."
Elsewhere, cryptocurrency exchange Binance committed to putting $10 million dollars minimum into a relief fund for Ukraine and Ukraine's army received $3 million from just one donation.