Ukraine Doubles Down on Crypto-Friendly Regulation Efforts, Aims for Top Spot

Fredrik Vold
Last updated: | 2 min read
Source: Adobe/Quatrox Production

 

Ukraine is aiming to become a top 5 country in the world in terms of crypto legislation, and the efforts have the “total support” of both President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the government, according to a high-ranking Ukrainian government official.

“We are aiming for Ukraine to become one of the top 3-5 countries in the world with the best legislation for crypto,” said Alexander Bornyakov, Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation.

The deputy minister further said that the plan to place Ukraine among the leading countries in the world when it comes to crypto has the full support of the Ukrainian government.

Moreover, Bornyakov pointed to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as an area of particular interest to himself and the government. He said that the government believes one of the purposes of NFTs and the blockchain is to document history, and opined that this is especially important as Russia “tries to erase our history.”

The comments from Deputy Minister Bornyakov were given during a virtual panel discussion on Friday hosted by MetaHistory, a collaboration project between the Ukrainian NFT community and the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine.

Also participating in the discussion was Dmitriy Buterin, the father of the Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin, who focused on the opportunities crypto could bring for Ukraine.

“I’m personally looking forward to Ukraine becoming the world leader in crypto,” Buterin said, adding that he sees “tremendous opportunities” for the country if it embraces crypto.

Specifically, Buterin proposed that Ukraine open itself up as “a testbed” for new crypto projects. He said this is something that is badly needed given all of the “interesting experiments” that are taking place in the crypto world, and suggested that a form of crypto-based universal basic income (UBI) could be part of it.

Meanwhile, Buterin also commented on the role of blockchain in preserving history, arguing that history is something that is often considered “far away from our regular life,” but that blockchain can bring it closer to modern day-to-day life.

The old Soviet Union “perverted” and “lied about” history, he said, before adding that with blockchain technology, there is now “a new opportunity to preserve history.”

Other participants in the discussion included Alona Shevchenko, the co-founder of UkraineDAO, who said her group has so far raised USD 8m in crypto donations in support of the Ukrainian people. Out of this was the sale of an NFT of the Ukrainian flag for close to USD 7m, Shevchenko said.

UkraineDAO is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) launched by the Russian feminist punk protest group Pussy Riot and NFT collectives Trippy Labs and PleasrDAO

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