Ukraine accepts DOT, founder Gavin Wood donates $5.8 million

Calls from the crypto community for Ukraine to accept other cryptocurrencies have been answered. The official Ukraine Twitter account shared that it will now accept donations from Polkadot (DOT), while other cryptocurrencies will soon be added. 

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: $DOT: 1x8aa2N2Ar9SQweJv9vsuZn3WYDHu7gMQu1RePjZuBe33Hv.
More cryptocurrencies to be accepted soon.

– Ukraine / Україна (@Ukraine) March 1, 2022

Gavin Wood, the co-founder of Polkadot had previously shared that if the Ukraine wallets were to add DOT, he would personally contribute $5 million. He made true on his promise, donating 298,367.2269896686 DOT, which is roughly $5.7 million, to Ukrainian wallets.

https://t.co/bFyYkKDseL

– Gavin Wood (@gavofyork) March 1, 2022

Total crypto donations for Ukrainian charities, the military and the government have been over $37 million, by Cointelegraph estimates. Wood’s single donation comprises over 10% of the total crypto donations.

Indeed, Wood’s donation is one of the largest individual crypto donations to date. Sam Bankman-Fried’s platform, FTX, donated $25 to each Ukrainian on his exchange platform, while CEO Deepak Thapliyal of Chain.com donated 100 Ether (ETH), or over $280,000 USD.

Besides Wood, the Polkadot ecosystem had already contributed over $210,000 to the official DOT wallet for Ukraine since this morning, according to Polkadot blockchain data.

For cryptocurrencies not accepted by Ukraine, Coingate, a Lithuanian-based fintech, offers a workaround. As a payment gateway for cryptocurrencies, Coingate allows holders of other cryptos to donate to Ukraine.

The coingate cryptocurrency donation portal. Source: Coingate

Coingate manages the crypto payments for a list of over 70 cryptocurrencies, eventually crediting the Ukraine bank account with euros. Coingate told Cointelegraph, “In the past five days, we have raised 7000 EUR from various crypto communities.”

Related: Crypto exchanges consider Ukraine’s call to freeze Russians’ Bitcoin

To date, the crypto community has been quick to come to the aid of Ukraine with donations and words of encouragement. Twitter observers noted that Ukraine’s innovative crypto activity was an attempt at “making history.”

Making history here if it does end up happening, the first creation of digitally native national value

Did you donate, anon? https://t.co/zbfjveg7k0

– Zhu Su (@zhusu) March 1, 2022