Huge surge of crypto donations to Ukrainian Fundraising programs

There has been a huge surge in crypto donations being sent to Ukrainian fundraising programs from around the world, in the wake of the brutal attack on Ukraine’s democracy by the Russian Federation, beginning February 24, 2022. The amount of donations in crypto is notable, most likely the biggest crypto donations drive so far in history, and the tech-savviness of the Ukrainian government and their supporting teams has allowed for official crypto donation portals for the various currencies to be created almost immediately.

Crypto Donations to Ukrainian Fundraising programs

Crystal’s analysts are monitoring the cryptocurrency donation programs that have been launched in support of Ukraine – both by the government and other entities – noting that over $125+ million in crypto donations have been collected so far as of May 12, 2022 (for March 10, 2022, we had calculated $82+ million and for March 4, 2022, we had calculated it at $53+ million).

Compared with traditional finance (tradfi) donations – where, for example, UAH 6 billion+ so far had been transferred to a special account of Ukraine’s armed forces by March 2, 2022, we can see that tradfi fundraising still out ways crypto fundraising by a long way. However, it is heartening to see the crypto community come together in aid of Ukraine. It confirms the reason that many of us are dedicated to the decentralized finance mission.

While this type of fundraising is generally well-intended by the many involved, major online donation drives often – if not always – find themselves followed by bad actor activity, where we can blatantly see scammers and illicit entities publishing fake addresses for donations, and then, funds disappearing. This activity is being identified and marked down on Crystal’s platform. In this report, you can see the dynamics of the various verified crypto donation programs we’ve noted so far, and at the end of this report, you’ll see how you can help report potentially risky crypto donation activity via our (free) Crystal Block Explorer.

We have also created a list of official Ukraine donation programs, go to our verified list: https://crystalblockchain.com/verified-ukraine-donation-programs-list/

Donations by Type

According to our May 12 data, a slight majority of the crypto donations made so far (52%) have been targeted to support the Ukrainian army, with a slightly lesser amount of donations (48%) having been made to humanitarian programs supporting the cause. This ratio changed from 63% for the military organizations and 37% donated to humanitarian aid by March 10, 2022.

Donations by Currency

Within the crypto donation programs, we looked at, we were also able to analyze the donations by currency, and we can see that as of May 12, 2022, more than half of the donations made so far have been in ETH (ether), with another large portion having been donated in BTC (bitcoin), USDT (Tether), and BUSD (Binance USD).