The world feels backwards and upside down and altogether too much.
My friend recently sent me an article about Dax Shepard dating Ashley Olsen back in the golden days of 2006.
I saw a Tik Tok forecasting trends for 2022 that said, “Being mentally ill is in. It was momentarily in during the early 2000s and then there was a break during Obama’s presidency where being mentally ill was out. And then it came back”.
I saw a girl on Instagram wearing what I can only equate to an oversized dish rag that a rabid animal got a hold of and a Von Dutch trucker hat. The caption read “thrift haul ;)” and the comments read “babe, so cool!” Fashion sense is becoming increasingly moot.
And finally, last week, this headline: “War Bonds, but make them non-fungible.”
This is not a drill.
Ukraine is planning to release its own collection of non-fungible tokens to support its troops defending against invading Russian forces, making it one of the first countries to release NFTs.
A NFT refresher because every time I talk about them, I understand less:
The real definition: Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) are a kind of crypto asset which represents a digital file such as an image, video or text. They exist on a blockchain, (a blockchain is a record of transactions kept on networked computers). The blockchain serves as a public ledger, allowing anyone to verify the NFT’s authenticity and who owns it. This is supposedly special because unlike most digital items which can be endlessly reproduced, each NFT has a unique digital signature, meaning it is one of a kind.
The other definition: You’re a man and you’ve decided that you are not satisfied with having the easiest course of life in human history. You’ve decided that you want to own something that doesn’t exist. So, you give another person (doesn’t have to be a man but we all know that it is another man) thousands of dollars and he says, “hey, you own this thing now that doesn’t exist but it’s cool because it’s only yours and no one else can ever have it unless you decide to sell it to, undoubtedly, another man. Enjoy dude.”
The tweet that sent us further into the future than I’d like to be:
Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov took to Twitter early this month to write:
“Every day there are more and more people willing to help Ukraine to fight back. … We will announce NFTs to support Ukrainian Armed Forces soon.”
It’s the latest initiative in Ukraine’s crypto-friendly fundraising campaign. Don’t worry. I also didn’t know Ukraine had a crypto-friendly fundraising campaign.
The crypto donations Ukraine has already received in a very loose point form:
· $50 million worth of crypto has been donated to the nation this past week.
· A $200,000 CryptoPunk wearing a blue bandana was sent to Ukraine’s wallet.
· An additional $270 million has been raised in war bonds.
· Yes, let’s go back to the $200,000 “CryptoPunk”.
· This NFT was transferred to Ukraine’s Ethereum wallet on March 1st (inevitably, from one dude to another dude)
· Michael Chobanian, a Ukrainian crypto exchange founder who is helping the Ministry of Digital Transformation handle donations, stated that at least $14 million of donated crypto had already been spent on military hardware and supplies for civilians, including food and gas.
· “The majority of spending is actually done in crypto” Chobanian said. His exchange, Kuna, operates the digital wallets used by the Ukrainian government. It’s a new dawn. It’s a new day. And we now help fight wars with pixelated images of “cryptopunks”.
The counterattack:
Ukraine’s ministry of digital transformation has stated that they would use the current donations and future NFT funds “to destroy as much Russian soldiers as possible.”
Fedorov (our Vice Prime Minister) has asked major crypto exchanges to block the digital wallet addresses of Russian users. Yet several major platforms have declined to impose any such blanket ban (a decision that experts of war and crypto and manliness say weakens Western attempts to isolate Moscow following its invasion of Ukraine).
Airdrop. But not the iPhone kind.
In the same futuristic tweet, Fedorov said that Ukraine was canceling its hyped “airdrop” reward. Ukraine announced the airdrop as a reward to donors on March 2nd, leading to additional millions in crypto being donated to the country before it was scrapped a day later.
What is an “airdrop reward” you’re wondering? It’s not the application on my iPhone where I share drunken photos and videos with my friends from our trip to Vegas? Apparently not.
In crypto world, an airdrop is a token giveaway typically used to encourage adoption (or, in this case, donations). I really hate homonyms at the best of times, but it should be illegal for tech language to engage in this sort of chaos.
Some critics are calling the besieged country’s sudden airdrop cancellation a rug pull. (I’m sorry, they’re a bit busy fighting a war and trying to save their civilians lives, but carry on). The architect behind El Salvador’s bitcoin bonds tweeted, “War is not an excuse to #shitcoin.”
On that brilliant note. Stay tuned for Ukraine’s upcoming NFTs (and my upcoming alcoholism – this is, yet again, my terrible pitch for a raise).