Crypto in Action: Powering Ukraine's Resilience by Rev Miller | Devcon SEA

[Music] hello hello everyone uh great to be here so my name is ref I'm I'm Ukrainian I'm um I'm one of actually active participants in um a lot of initiatives that happening on the ground in Ukraine so I today I'll be sharing more about what is happening on the ground how Ukraine U stands out with the crypto initiatives and how that actually leads to the physical resilience of Ukraine before I start um I'd like to um take a moment to just think of how many of us actually day-to-day build credibly neutral systems but that doesn't mean that we are ourselves have to be credibly neutral I think when in the moments of Crisis that's where the Testament of crypto really happens and each of us can contribute to that uh that's a photo of a lady walking her dog just casually in Ukraine um the reason for such Darkness as you can see on the picture is that the 50% of Ukrainian Energy System has been disabled because of Russian missiles uh what that means that a lot of day-to-day activities that every Ukrainian you know used to do they're changing and they have they have to adapt to the realities you can see that uh that that's uh part of the interview from Yulan who's a head of uh Foundation leading a lot of initiatives for renewable energy in Ukraine and she see she said that from The Invasion you know a lot of uh sources of energy that Ukraine used to uh produced like from wind power you know the the nuclear and so on has been destroyed and right now we are face with the challenges where we need to rebuild the systems uh one of the things that every Ukrainian probably has either in their homes or if they're business owners or you know running nonprofits it's generators generators fill our day-to-day lives they help us light up our homes as well as our you know shops and most importantly Our Lives specifically for um medicine you know that that that pretty much becomes a difference between life of death for some people uh there's been some of the powerful initiatives like points of invincibility that basically started this decentralized movement of creating this uh local places where people can you know charge up their phones their devices get get warmer and just just socialize with others in this tough times and moving forward I would say that one of the critical part of the physical resilience related to energy is creating more uh smart grids and micro grids that offer more um secure ways of people to distribute powers to their homes and um you know enable um this uh more reliable autonomous way for them to power up their lives so you can see this gra graph where you know there's Renewable Power Generation Source then you can store some of that in battery energy that you know can light up your home or the the the the whole you know units of the buildings and then you have the other utility power generation outside so this this is what's happening right now in Ukraine we see a lot of uh different initiatives creating uh this renewable uh you know renewable decentralized uh energy systems for high schools for hospitals the the photo on the right is actually hospital and then you see the high school uh moving forward the food and water so by March 2023 11 million ukrainians has been facing the hunger uh the reason for that was uh severe damages for the infrastructure of you know food and and water uh part of that was um obviously our agriculture around 9% of all Farmland has been just pretty much destroyed uh and Abandoned and because of that a lot of farmers they were basically facing with this problems where they had to shut down their businesses unfortunately um nevertheless um we've seen uh a lot of positive signs of you know the the the opposition uh you know people started creating this different alternative decentralized networks of food distribution a lot of organizations that came to Ukraine to support abroad were using local food to you know support local economy as well as uh the powerful use case was with crypto payments some of the locals started actually accepting crypto payments as with the Advent of crypto uh debit cards uh that became more popular in one specific case is kov kadum um so the the dump was destroyed by Russian missile and that was unfortunate realities and despite this realities people were still you know providing um food and also evacuating people and animals uh the reason why were they were trying to provide food with drones is because part of that um area was occupied by Russian so people weren't able to actually rescue people uh yeah um and the other uh sort of this you know like Army of Ukraine is that a lot of volunteers around the country that unite to prepare food for civilians and Military this lady on the right is part of the volunteering group that prepares around two two and a half thousand meals every single day and I see I'll would say so far till today there was around three billion meals distributed by one of the largest organizations in Ukraine and the housing um you know the war um enabled us to create no ways to you know protect ourselves while integrating this you know you know shelters in our day-to-day lives and different you know temporary housing but then um there was other groups of people that helped out like volunteers you can see me some of my friends that are trying to rebuild and becoming more and more creative of how we are doing this and one of the things I actually came up with is how they can engage you know people who like to Rave and people who like to rebuild so they created this inititive collect repair together rap together basically and it was pretty cool and actually they ended up rebuilding many houses with volunteers uh completely for free only you know the the cost for just like rebuilding materials and a good friend of mine Jean Kristoff he once asked uh mayor of Lou why there are not printing buildings to be able to host the people as there more more and more people moving to wave so soon later he actually did that himself with some of the people so they ended up uh having this project which is the largest 3D ped School in Ukraine which is pretty cool and they're now leveraging you know Ai and Robotics to fasten the process of rebuilding Ukraine and uh using also uh local materials for that for the internet communications I would say we have diverse um sort of resilient connection system with a lot of internet service providers actually coordinating and um communicating and cooperating with each other which enables more thecentral um the movement towards um enriching and strengthening the the Ukrainian you know connection at the same time across all of the Ukraine we have uh 47,000 starlings that day-to-day help us connect with each other especially that becomes critical in the areas where other alternatives are pretty much non-existent because of the destruction you can see that there's smart traffic management system where there's rerouting if there's any damaged areas balancing across all available networks and then there's day-to-day emergency response teams consist of the telecommunication Engineers that are always Deploy on the ground whenever they work is needed to be fixed um then we have Dia app which is fantastic app built by Ukrainian government that features more than 130 um government services you know you can you can have your digital passport your driving license you can get married in the matter verus you can pay your taxes you can pay your bills whatever you want we can all do that in um literally within one app and that app used by over 20 million people uh it also provides a lot of services for internally displaced people and at the same time they actually support crypto a lot they introduce crypto education program uh they that featured within the app for 20 million people I also contribute a little bit to make that happen at the same time they play important role actually in Ukrainian uh Community they support a lot of initiatives while also trying to be a bit neutral uh this is part of the event we hosted in 2022 we hosted the hackaton and bomb shelter with like 500 people joining around the world and more than 100 hackers being with us so vitalic also came thank you so much vitalic and a lot of people yeah we're very happy that even in bomb shelters you know people can still continue building um and I would say that you know crypto has been used in a variety of ways besides the ones that I mentioned uh and crypto proved to be extremely helpful in Ukraine and actually throughout the the whole like Wartime the adoption of crypto has increased drastically um and yeah from the people of Ukraine I would like to thank you everyone and before wrap up share some some key learnings that happened so crypto enabled border list you know coordination and support when actually traditional systems failed and I faced that myself in the especially first days so full scale invasion Community coordination both like local and Global played crucial role on how we actually help each other and survive and something that we've seen that wartime realities showed us that adoptability is vital and if we want to have the real resilience decentralization is uh at the core of that so and with that um I would like to say thank you [Applause]