By Elizabeth Howcroft
LONDON (Reuters) – Ukraine will unveil plans for NFTs to support its armed forces, its vice-prime minister said on Thursday, the latest move in Kyiv’s efforts to raise funds in crypto assets after Russia invaded the country last week.
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a kind of crypto asset which represents a digital file such as an image, video or text. They surged in popularity in 2021, generating $25 billion of sales volume.
“We will announce NFTs to support Ukrainian Armed Forces soon,” Mykhailo Fedorov said in a tweet, without giving any further details of the project.
“Every day there are more and more people willing to help Ukraine to fight back the aggression.”
Fedorov, also Ukraine’s minister of digital transformation, has spearheaded Kyiv’s push to raise funds in cryptoassets.
Ukraine last week posted appeals on social media for donations of bitcoin and other digital tokens to support the country. As of Wednesday, it had raised crypto worth almost $43 million in around almost 67,000 donations, according to blockchain researcher Elliptic.
Ukraine’s ministry of digital transformation has told Reuters they would use the funds “To destroy as much Russian soldiers as possible.”
Fedorov last week asked major crypto exchanges to block the digital wallet addresses of Russian users. Yet several major platforms have declined to impose any such blanket ban – a decision that experts say weakens Western attempts to isolate Moscow following its invasion of Ukraine.
(Reporting by Elizabeth Howcroft; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)
