Russia For Sale
2022 started well: the world was recovering from the pandemic, and NFT trends and opportunities were the talk of the town. 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 crypto and NFT enthusiasts, 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 the imperialist aggression of Russia 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 lands of other countries, so we wanted to give him the taste of his own medicine.
Our online platform, Russiaforsale.org, offers users NFT versions of Russian regions to claim. 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. We transfer 100% of the proceeds to the Ministry of Digital Transformation of Ukraine. Each transaction is transparent, and the record is openly available.
Our data journey consisted of gathering info on nearly 2500 Russian regions. The data science team took the shapefiles of Russian districts 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 compiled the database of all districts with their English names, geographical vector borders, and coats of arms (if they had one). The next step was to create unique visual images for each district. We developed them in an automated way and naturally based these visuals on their weird real-world counterparts. The design team created layout rules (colors, typography, shape, and coat of arms) and generated 2443 visuals. These visuals eventually became the final NFTs publicly available on the most popular NFT marketplace, Opensea: https://opensea.io/collection/russiaforsale.
TV channels covered our campaign, and it 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, tweeted about receiving donations from our project. He disclosed how their ministry utilized 5 ETH made from selling Moscow. 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.
