How Ukraine is using crypto donations

March 1, 2022 Europe欧洲 Events & Announcements Industry Updates

On Saturday, Ukraine’s official Twitter account shared two cryptocurrency wallet addresses — a bitcoin wallet address and an Ethereum wallet address. “Stand with the people of Ukraine. Now accepting cryptocurrency donations. Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDT,” @Ukraine wrote.

But it’s hard to know for sure who owns and operates these wallets — a public address is just a long string of letters and numbers. They don’t technically belong to anyone as someone can transfer the ownership of a wallet.

Stand with the people of Ukraine. Now accepting cryptocurrency donations. Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDT.

BTC – 357a3So9CbsNfBBgFYACGvxxS6tMaDoa1P

ETH and USDT (ERC-20) – 0x165CD37b4C644C2921454429E7F9358d18A45e14

— Ukraine / Україна (@Ukraine) February 26, 2022

The first logical reaction to a tweet like that is that you should proceed with extreme caution. It is unclear if those wallets are run by a government member, a government agency, someone outside of the government who is informally facilitating crypto donations on behalf of the government or someone pretending to be a government member.

But there are several reasons why it looks more likely than unlikely that the Ukrainian government is in control of the funds received on these wallet addresses. First, the tweet hasn’t been deleted, which most likely rules out the possibility that @Ukraine has been compromised. People running the official government account would have removed the tweet relatively quickly if somebody had hijacked the account.

Second, other people shared those wallet addresses, starting with Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation Mykhailo Fedorov. “Stand with the people of Ukraine. Now accepting cryptocurrency donations,” Fedorov wrote.

Third, a spokesperson for Ukraine’s ministry of digital transformation confirmed that the tweet from @Ukraine is genuine. “Yes, these accounts are state-owned; we’ve created a special crypto fund,” a spokesperson told me in an email.

And many people have already sent crypto assets to those addresses. This part is easier to figure out as you can simply enter the public addresses into a blockchain explorer to see the list of incoming and outgoing transactions.