Unfortunately, in February Russian brutal aggression raged on, wreaking havoc and mass suffering in Ukraine. Immediately, the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine announced that official crypto wallets are open for collecting donations. We knew that the crypto and the NFT enthusiasts, who are more compelled by the idea of decentralization and bringing playfulness into the world, would be way more attracted to a donation platform that made this process entertaining. So, as an answer to Russia’s imperialist aggression on Ukraine, we decided to sell Russian territory piece by piece and donate all the collected funds to support Ukraine. Putin is known for grabbing other countries’ lands, so let’s give him the taste of his own medicine.
On our online platform Russiaforsale.org, we offer users to choose and claim a region of Russia in the form of NFT. Every piece is unique and features the name, area, and an authentic coat of arms. At the moment our offering consists of Small (0.05 ETH), Medium (0.18 ETH), Large (0.85 ETH), Extra Large Lands (1.68 ETH), and Big cities. 100% of the proceeds are transferred to the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine. Each transaction is done with transparency and the record is openly available.
Our data journey consisted of gathering info on nearly 2500 Russian regions.
The data science team took the Russian district's shapefile as the base dataset from an open-source platform (https://gadm.org/download_world.html). We extracted the names from there (In Russian) and created several tools for collecting data on them in an automated way. We archived the result and created the database of all districts with their English names, geographical vector borders, and coat of arms (if they had one). The next step was to create unique visual images for each district, which would also be developed in an automated way and naturally based on their weird real-world counterparts. The design team created layout rules (colors, typography, shape, and coat of arms) and generated 2443 visuals which eventually became the final NFTs that are publicly available for sale on the most popular NFT marketplace Opensea: https://opensea.io/collection/russiaforsale
The campaign was covered on TV channels, appeared in 134 articles (including Bitcom.com, Cryptosaurus.tech, coinscreed.com, cryptometanftnews.com, nftevening.com, indy100.com, and bandt.com) reaching around 2,600,000 people interested in NFTs and provoked discussion on social media, with a media budget of zero dollars. The Ukraine Deputy Minister of Digital Transformation Alex Bornyakov publicly tweeted about receiving donations from our project, talking about how money from selling Moscow (5 ETH) was utilized.
So far, we’ve raised 7.4 ETH, which equals more than 20K and the campaign is ongoing. With the efforts of thousands of purchasers, our project has the potential to continue in the long term and raise the funds needed for Ukraine.
