ukraine.sol Ep #60

On a special episode of the Solana Podcast, Sergey Vasylchuk (CEO, Everstake) talks about Aid for Ukraine, a DAO created by Everstake and endorsed by the government of Ukraine and Anatoly Yakovenko to support Ukraine during the ongoing crisis — and how it came together on Nation.

00:38 -  Intro
02:51 - Origin of the initiative / How it works
06:25 - Ukrainian government receiving FIAT currency 
09:13 - Banking, a legacy system
10:04 - News on the ground
12:39 - What can people do to get involved

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Austin (00:09):

Hello, and welcome to a special episode of the Solana podcast, I'm Austin Federa. Today we're joined by Sergey Vasylchuk, who's the CEO of Everstake, but we're actually not here to talk today about Everstake. We're here to talk about aid for Ukraine, and the situation in Ukraine and the project that Sergey and a bunch of others from the Ukraine and connected to the Ukraine have launched. Which is a fundraising effort to help raise money that's urgently needed for the government and for people there. Sergey welcome and thanks for joining us today.

Sergey Vasylchuk (00:39):

Yeah. Hi guys. Thank you for listening and thank you for helping us in this difficult situation. And yeah,the  situation in Ukraine is quite terrible. So we have been protecting our country for close to a week and we are struggling with one of the biggest armies in the world. But we still resist and sure, we'll win soon. But this will need... It's not just a magic maker, many of the people trying to protect their country, military are dying, military are fighting, the civilian are also trying to do all they can. And generalization is that every citizen of the Ukraine, it doesn't depend where he is located and what he can do, they do something. I do not know anyone who just sits in the idle and observes the news. First, probably two days for me was shock. 

I cannot believe what has happened. I was just stuck to the news and seeing what is going on, calling some relatives, asking what I can do to help and what's going on? It's just shock. And I was stuck, but sooner or later, I had the conversation with Anatoly Yakovenko from Solana, he is originally Ukrainian. He asked me, "Hey guys, what is going on? How are we going to help you? Let's do something." I said, "Yeah, I cannot sit and cry, and wait and I need to do something." And it was the case when we started to understand that we need some impact. And that's why we decided to start this activity.

Austin (02:17):

So the process here that's been running on is there's Ukraine.soul, which is a Bonfida name routing layer address, that routes to a wallet that's controlled by a MultiSig Dow on Solana. You can go to nation.io/dow/Ukraine, you can see this there too. There's about $1.45 million contributed so far, as well as several NFTs from projects that will also be sold and liquidated to generate funds here. There's a lot of different efforts, raising different kinds of crypto to aid the government and the people. What was sort of your thought to do this, to start this up? And can you talk a little bit about how the country's actually involved as well in the government?

Sergey Vasylchuk (02:59):

Well we have quite an unusual ministry, which called Ministry of the Digital Transformation. It was created a few years ago, and many of the politicians were skeptical and it was a bit like late in the day. It's just few guys from the IT ground. They will not change nothing. But for the least two year guys made the great application. We probably have the digital ID have digital, driver license, have the digital vaccination certificate, whatever. So it go digital. The many of the services, the country are become in our smartphone. And those guys are quite trustworthy and respectable in our community. They just start to accept the donation, in any form of the money that is available. And you should understand that currently there is marshal law in the Ukraine and central bank put limitation that is hard to transact in the foreign countries, foreign currency, sorry for us is Euro a dollar.