Gavin Wood Will Donate $5M To Ukraine If DOT Address Is Posted

Polkadot’s Gavin Wood will donate $5M to Ukraine if a DOT address is published, as donations are pouring from all around the world to support the country in the war against Russia so let’s read more in today’s latest crypto news.

In a much-criticized tweet, Gavin Wood as the co-founder of Ethereum and Polkadot founder offered $5 million to Ukraine under the condition they post a DOT address. A lot of people from around the world are donating to the Ukrainian side of the conflict since Russia decided to invade the country and most of the donations are funneled through traditional means of fundraising and donations but huge amounts are coming in crypto.

The mostly Ukraine-based @Subsocial team have been building donation functionality into their platform for @Polkadot/@kusamanetwork tokens. Just goes into a wallet controlled by Subsocial currently, but a less trust-bound solution on its way…💙💛 https://t.co/Dy51wWfwvV

— Gavin Wood (@gavofyork) February 27, 2022

While Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense says it cannot officially accept crypto donations, NGOs in the country are helping with the conflict. A non-governmental organization supporting the Ukrainian army received up to $4 million worth of BTC alone. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine led to huge support on Twitter and millions in donations. According to Elliptic, about $17 million were raised including the $1.86 million from one NFT collection.

These numbers increased during the weekend and will continue to do so with the number of people donating, which is increasing as well. Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin talked about the war and pointed the Twitter users to UkraineDAO that is co-founded by Pussy Riot and members of Trippy Labs. However, Gavin Wood, as the founder of Polkadot, took it to Twitter to talk about the donations but it didn’t quite play out as well. Gavin Wood will donate to the Ukrainian cause if only the people which are under attack, post a DOT address.

Stand with the people of Ukraine. Now accepting cryptocurrency donations. Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDT.

BTC – 357a3So9CbsNfBBgFYACGvxxS6tMaDoa1P

ETH and USDT (ERC-20) – 0x165CD37b4C644C2921454429E7F9358d18A45e14

— Ukraine / Україна (@Ukraine) February 26, 2022

The post raised some eyebrows and made a lot of people angry. Wood promoted Subsocial which is a Ukrainian crypto proejct that accepts donations in a host of different cryptocurrencies related to the Polkadot system. Subsocial are building the Underlying architecture for the social networks of the future and are connected to Kusama. It looks like Wood is being quite selective and it is conditioning his eventual donations. Some of the critics are calling Wood’s Tweet a product placement leveraging a huge global conflict with a 5M price rag. Most are cheering on the donation but if Wood goes through with it, he might want to avoid capital gains taxes by paying in DOT tokens and not converting them.