LocalBitcoins Exempted Fees For Crypto Donations To Ukraine

LocalBitcoins exempted fees for crypto donations to Ukraine to give solidarity with the people who are suffering from the Russian invasion that started a week ago as we reported in the previous cryptocurrency news.

The famous peer-to-peer trading platform LocalBitcoins exempted fees for crypto donations to Ukraine and as a result, the residents in Ukraine can cash out their BTC in local currency with no fees. The exchange published the announcement a few days ago and introduced a free Bitcoin wallet for the Ukrainians in Ukraine and abroad which also exempts additional fees on BTC transfers. Removing the fees on the platform is a part to help these people that are under attack by the Russian army.

The crypto exchange expressed sympathy with the people from Ukraine and added that the core value is freedom. LocalBitcoins removed the fees on BTC transfers to Ukrainian Wallets and removed the conversion fees for BTC cashed out in the Ukraine currency Hryvnia. The use of crypto in Ukraine enhanced since the conflict between the two countries started. Ukraine also surpassed $20 million in donations sent via crypto. The government of Ukraine launched a crypto wallet that is aimed at receiving donations from across the world.

The Ukraine NFTs also became popular and the platform Ikonai also launched an NFT sale to raise the funds for charity where 10% of the royalties fee will be donated to charity once each NFT is sold. More than 43 million NFTs editions are listed and aimed at gathering $432,875,120. with the West banning Russia over the invasion, the Vice President of Ukraine demanded all crypto exchanges to ban Russian wallet addresses as well and only a few agreed to do so.

Although LocalBitcoins is not the only exchange to show support for Ukraine, it did see some positive response from crypto-friendly people and on the other hand, the overall crypto space still doesn’t belong only to the West with most platforms denying or canceling their operations in Russia that has become a huge focal point of criticism. The Ukrainian authorities are afraid that the sanctioned individuals and Russia can still use crypto to avoid the effects of the sanctions. The executives and founders of platforms as Kraken CEO said, respect the people in Ukraine but won’t restrict access for Russian users.

While some of the platforms preferred to take the middle ground, Binance decided to restrict the users on the list of sanctions and the CEO Chengpang Zhao called the sanctions to block all Russians “unethical”:

“Whoever is on the sanctions list, they won’t be able to use our platform; for whoever is not, they can. It’s not our decision to make to freeze user accounts. Facebook hasn’t banned Russian users. Google hasn’t banned Russian users. Google has not blocked off Russia. The U.S. hasn’t done that.”