Try Quests to earn cryptoUkraine & The Ethereum Crypto Donations
It has been a year since the Ukraine government organization tweeted their official Ethereum and Bitcoin Wallets to accept Donations after Russia's Invasion. What are the tokens inflow and outflow of their Ethereum wallet in that year?
The Russo-Ukrainian War is an ongoing international conflict between Russia, alongside Russian-backed separatists, and Ukraine, which began in February 2014 - Wikipedia
On 21 February 2022, Address concerning the events in Ukraine was aired, and three days after On conducting a special military operation was broadcasted which lead to the Russian Invasion of Ukraine.
Ukraine needed help immediately and that's the reason 2 days after the invasion, Ukraine Tweeted their Crypto Wallets asking for Donations.
Ukrainian deputy digital minister Alex Bornyakov explained:
If we used the traditional financial system it was going to take days
We were able to secure the purchase of vital items in no time at all via crypto, and what is amazing is that around 60% of suppliers were able to accept crypto, I didn't expect this.
Companies manufacturing goods like bulletproof vests, helmets, and different kinds of optics, even they were able to receive crypto
What Happened in the Web3 Space?
Their Ethereum Wallet received a high amount of Donations in $ETH and $USDT, but also a lot of different Tokens:
- Some of them are recognizable, such as $MATIC and $USDC but there is also a significant amount of Meme Coins and Scam Tokens.
I'll separate all the tokens received by this wallet into two groups, tokens with an actual price nowadays and tokens without a price
Although the number of Donations of these Tokens without price wasn't significant the amount of unique tokens is almost the same, overall most of the users sending transfers to this account were doing that with a good intention.
A total of $42.9M was received in the Ethereum wallet
Although the precise amount could be debatable, because I considered the actual price of all the tokens today, with the only exception being $ETH which I used their daily Average the day an $ETH donation was received.
Some of these tokens w/o price could have had some value in the past, and maybe they were used at their maximum value, but for the sake of simplicity, I decided to do it that way.
Most of the Donations were in $ETH and $USDT as indicated by their tweet, but $USDC & $DAI donations were also popular reaching more than $1M in Volume each one with significantly less activity.
After these stablecoins, $WETH was also a popular token donated by the people.
The rest of the tokens were donated in most cases by a single user, with some exceptions such as $MATIC or $UST for example.
In the end of the $42.9M donated almost 99% was with $ETH and Stablecoins ($DAI, $USDT & $USDC) Donations.
Inflow Activity is really strong in the first months since the creation of the wallet, after March 2022 the number of donations and donators became significantly smaller, but the $USD volume of donations is still significant in some Months of 2022.
In February 2023, There is an Uptrending in the $USD Volume reaching 75k in $ETH donations and 124k in Stablecoins Donations.
Most of the March 2022 Donations are made between the 1st and 3rd day of that month, meanwhile, the $USD Volume seems to present the same uptrend on these days with some smaller spikes in the 4th of April 2022 and the 28th of June 2022
In the First 6 Days the USD Volume of Donations was always above 1.4M, but on the 2nd and 3rd of March, the activity reached a total of 63k Donations 77% of the total donations in only two days.
Most of the Donations were of $10 to $100 or $100 to $1000, but donations with $1000 or more made the most USD Volume.
Most people donated less than $1000, but the donations of the higher tiers were the ones making the biggest volume. Only 40 people donated more than $100,000 making a total volume of $21.203M which is almost half of the total $USD Received by Ukraine.
Most of the Donations are from Unlabeled Addresses and we can consider them as regular users, meanwhile, donations from CEX accounts are in second place in both activity and USD volume.
The biggest donation was $3.1M made in 2 transactions by this user with a transaction of 100 $USDT first and then 3.1M $USDT in this transaction.
The 2nd place by USD Volume made 3 transactions of 1M $USDT each. Tx1, Tx2, Tx3
Blockfolio and FTX Exchange are some of the labeled addresses that donated and are in the top 10 by USD Volume.
Most of the addresses in the top 10 by the number of donations are CEX wallets, with the exception of one wallet which seems to be a heavy dex trader by the number of transactions in their Etherscan (87,900 tx).
Almost all of these wallets donated more than 100k, but only the FTX exchange Wallet made it into the top 10 by USD Volume.
More than 41.43% of the total Outflows from this Wallet are to 0x88ef7bf4e94d9c6a4615e5a9f32ea2d2f141f2e9 it seems to be that this wallet is from a Ukrainian because their first transaction was made with Kuna in October 2020, and most of their activity is with Kuna.
29.37% of the total Outflows are to the Hop Protocol address, which means these funds were bridged to other blockchains.
And 26.08% of the Outflows were direct to Kuna Exchange.
In the end, most of the Donations reached Kuna as their final destination and then to the Ukrainian people.
In the First-Week of Donations, most of the $USD volume is going direct to Kuna, but on March 3 it seems that they decided to move some funds to the other Wallet.
On 19 April 2022, most of the funds were already moved, but we can see some spikes of outflow activity to the Hop Protocol in July and August 2022, after that the activity resumed on December 8th, and then the last Outflows were made in February 2023.
In the first days, the activity to Kuna was high but then they decided to stop sending funds to Kuna directly moving their donations to this other wallet and other blockchains through Hop.
On the 17th of August 2022, Mykhailo Fedorov (Ukraine's vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation) tweeted an image showcasing how they were spending the donations.
We need to take into account that this image considers all the funds raised in all the wallets across different blockchains and not only Ethereum.
In the Yahoo UK Finance Article they also interviewed Mark Lurie, CEO and co-founder of Shopyard Software, he said:
In a first-world, peace-time context, crypto’s benefits are marginal. While they are faster, more transparent and more efficient, most of the time they are less convenient
The Russo-Ukrainian war has put the failings of the traditional financial system into perspective
Ukrainians need money to pay for everything from food to drones, but receiving and sending that money has proven extremely difficult during wartime.
But thanks to the Crypto Donations which were almost immediately without delays caused by third-party authorization this incident shows us that in the words of Mark Lurie Again:
Perhaps the biggest impact of the Ukraine war on crypto is a new narrative. Before, crypto was seen as a method to evade law enforcement. Now, it is recognized as a tool to empower freedom fighters
The speed, transparency, and anonymity of the Cryptocurrencies helped not only Ukraine, but a lot of people who couldn't donate directly because of political problems such as the Russian people or communities that wanted to help Ukraine.
This chapter will be important in the present and the future for other countries that want to enter into this new era of payments.
What Happened on Twitter after the Tweet of Ukraine ETH & BTC Wallets?
A lot of people participated in the Twitter Thread showing a big amount of empathy towards the situation, Gavin Wood the founder of PolkaDOT and Sunny LU the CEO of VeChain asked Ukraine to create a VET and DOT wallets to receive $8M and $5M respectively and a lot of different projects with the goal to Help Ukraine Raised on the thread.
Eventually, a DAO called Aid For Ukraine was created where they reported all the news about Ukraine, and the Donations, showcasing in reports how they're spending the donations.
Summary
On February 26th, 2022 Ukraine tweeted their BTC and ETH wallets to receive Donations against the invasion of Russia 2 days ago.
During the First-Week since their tweet, their ETH wallet received more than 70k Donations (Transfers) and more than $25M in USD Volume, after that the number of daily donations decreased a lot but there are still people donating to this day.
Their Wallet not Only received $ETH and $USDT as indicated in their tweet but also more than 1M of $DAI and 1M of $USDC were sent in donations to this wallet.
There were a lot of other tokens sent such as $MATIC or $AAVE, which have prices, and a lot of tokens w/o prices, and also NFTs.
Most of the Donations were sent to Kuna the Ukrainian crypto exchange, although sometimes these donations take a detour to the Hop Protocol or this other wallet.
In the end, their Fundraising was a success and a DAO was created to showcase the situation and how they're spending the donations.
This event is a big victory for Cryptocurrencies showing us their power to be used as a payment to help in this case a Country.
Methodology
Using Flipside Data tables of Ethereum:
- ethereum.core.ez_eth_transfers & ethereum.core.ez_token_transfers to track Ukraine Wallet Inflows and Outflows of tokens with 0x165cd37b4c644c2921454429e7f9358d18a45e14 as the official Ethereum address of Ukraine.
- ethereum.core.fact_hourly_token_prices to get the $USD price of the tokens received.
- ethereum.core.dim_labels to label some addresses which donated to Ukraine and label the address which received the Donated Money.
Using the Transfers table I searched for all donations (transfers) with the Destiny being the Ukraine Wallet to get the inflows, I have to use Union All to join both the tokens and the eth tables.
For the case of the Outflows, I used the same method as before but this time with the Ukraine Wallet being the Origin, and then Union all both tables.
This Dashboard was inspired after reading this Article in Cointelegraph I wanted to showcase better the activity of their Ethereum Wallet for my Open Analytics.