Ukrainian refugees escape with life savings in Bitcoin on pen drive

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CNBC report­ed today that a 20-year-old refugee fled Ukraine and the only mon­ey he was able to car­ry was the Bit­coin he held on his pen dri­ve. The Ukrain­ian, going by Fadey, is not alone as many peo­ple are rely­ing on cryp­to to help them cross Euro­pean borders.

Due to issues with bank trans­ac­tions and long ATM queues at ATMs, many have been left with­out access to funds. How­ev­er, Fadey was able to make a P2P Bit­coin trade with a friend for $600 worth of the Pol­ish cur­ren­cy, zło­ty. He then used the mon­ey to buy a bus tick­et into Poland. Fadey told CNBC,

“I couldn’t with­draw cash at all, because the queues to ATMs were so long, and I couldn’t wait that much time.” 

Decentralisation empowers people in dark times.

This high­lights a point we raised ear­li­er in the con­flict: decen­tralised assets can empow­er dis­placed peo­ple flee­ing war. When the cen­tralised sys­tem col­laps­es, all that is need­ed is a basic inter­net con­nec­tion and a piece of paper con­tain­ing a seed phrase. Even those who have been able to with­draw fiat cur­ren­cy via ATMs have been restrict­ed to $33 per trans­ac­tion, which does not apply to crypto.

Ukraine already had the high­est cryp­to adop­tion in Europe, which is now help­ing many of its cit­i­zens sur­vive. The $2000 that Fadey could car­ry on his pen dri­ve equates to just under half of his life sav­ings. For all the cryp­to whales we analyse and read about, there are hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple like Fadey. Peo­ple to whom a few thou­sand dol­lars is the dif­fer­ence between life and death.

Embracing crypto

Ukraine is also embrac­ing cryp­to at a gov­ern­ment lev­el. It has received mil­lions of dol­lars in cryp­to dona­tions from all around the globe and offi­cial­ly legalised cryp­to this week. Hope­ful­ly, oth­er coun­tries will now see how cryp­to can aid their cit­i­zens dur­ing times of cri­sis and encour­age fur­ther adoption.

Bit­coin ATMs in bor­der coun­tries have allowed those escap­ing the Russ­ian inva­sion to access their funds once they are safe. It would be great to see more Bit­coin ATMs; how­ev­er, their exis­tence is cur­rent­ly in doubt after being banned in the UK last week.

Beyond the bor­ders, Por­tu­gal is also lead­ing the way in sup­port­ing Ukraini­ans relo­cate. The coun­try, which has zero cap­i­tal gains tax on cryp­to, wel­comes refugees, includ­ing cryp­to employ­ees from com­pa­nies such as NEAR. Por­tu­gal and Ukraine are both hubs of cryp­to devel­op­ment, so there is a nat­ur­al syn­er­gy for any Ukrain­ian cryp­to firms look­ing to relo­cate due to the war.

With over 3.5 mil­lion refugees trav­el­ling across Europe from Ukraine, access to funds is a real prob­lem. Cryp­to is not just an invest­ment tool for those hop­ing to out­pace the stock mar­ket­ing. For mil­lions of peo­ple all around the globe, cryp­to is open­ing up life­lines dur­ing some of the most chal­leng­ing times. Decen­tral­i­sa­tion does not just pro­tect our invest­ments; it saves the lives of those who rely upon it when they need it most.

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