# Web3 in the Ukraine government: integration & impact by Max Semenchuk | Devcon Bogotá

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2023-10-07
- Duration: 18:48
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-oZYgrEs6-HI
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZYgrEs6-HI

## Description

Visit the https://archive.devcon.org/ to gain access to the entire library of Devcon talks with the ease of filtering, playlists, personalized suggestions, decentralized access on Swarm, IPFS and more.
https://archive.devcon.org/archive/watch/6/web3-in-the-ukraine-government-integration-and-impact/

Note: Due to unfortunate technical issues, the first minute of Max's talk was missing audio and has been edited out. 

Speaker(s): Max Semenchuk
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Opportunity & Global Impact
Keywords: ukraine,web3

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Devcon 6 was held in Bogotá, Colombia on Oct 11 - 14, 2022.
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## Transcript

foreign [Music] I kind of would like to share with you some ideas about the ecosystem development in general and now about how you can take different people together align them under some Vision you know do some great stuff and how to build capacity how to resolve conflict how uh deal with the crisis and try to show it in the few case studies so uh when I just joined you know what what what did I see uh initially I was mostly working in the development so I was like specifically following my narrow field but when I started to look at the like country in general I learned that first of all Ukraine has one of the best adoption rates and for specific reasons like we don't have a Securities market and people don't trust Banks and so on but in the same way like the current situation as in many countries is quite like Gray Zone you know and uh the since 2012 or 14 there were like a bunch of tries to propose some kind of legislation or something that would guide this industry but all of them failed basically before this uh like new president came like zelensky and he had this vision of a country in a smartphone you know government is a smartphone and they created this ministry which consisted mostly of the business people you know and young people which was contrasting a lot with the other other Ministries and bodies so I started to work there and what I learned is like basically we can propose something but in order to pass anything you know we need a general consensus and at that time you know now it's getting much better but at that time most people knew crypto for money laundering like drugs and hacks and stuff like that so it was like we needed to come and speak to everybody and explain this only small percent of it you know like dollar is also like used for the same purposes it doesn't mean we need to bond it so uh in order to like make this uh happen you know I saw some specific like problems or challenges first of all every uh Ministry everybody or every business they had their own agenda you know they saw what they want to do you know like the National Bank just sees the currency aspect of it right and uh like or like somebody is just looking at The Exchange Market on the mining Market but not all of that together you know there was no specific vision of how that all will strive and uh also another part is like the businesses and the like web3 crowd is mostly like crypto anarchic and they hate government they don't want to even touch it and I kill it the same but uh also like there was no productive dialogue you know like no attempts to to build this connection and also most of the like this Holy Verse you know about like somebody wants to do something in a position and all that fighting happened inside of Ukraine nobody thought wow this is like a global like movement you know how do we become competitive like worldwide or how do we think about it as like not just inside but but as general and uh final final problem was that was that was a middle of bear market so it was really hard to find any resources to develop it but even like to Illustrated on the case even like with a project that really got funding you know like most of them didn't but there was this project that Ministry was developing like it passed the law on the what is virtual assets basically crypto you know like what is the key what is the wallet stuff like that and there was a norm that all of the service providers need to be in some kind of register so we should have some exchanges or Brokers like their license is registered somewhere and we got this task and this funding from the uh Swiss Embassy yeah please develop it's a nice stuff you know like develop this registry I got super experience the Consultants they proposed us with three options so one is like fully public system probably on ethereum but maybe something um whatever but then hybrid solution you know semi-closed and centralized and they did a comparison the balance scorecard you know like on the security cost of support the anti like uh corruption effects and stuff like that and all together like the ethereum solution the public solution was winning you know I was like they said like we propose this solution and I was like yes let's do that but we needed to consult with other stakeholders and the donors who sponsor that like we ask them what what do they think and they said well we will you probably have 200 companies do you really need blockchain for this you know and then we talk to the businesses like hey guys what do you think we should build and they said could you just do no registration at all or we will take our business elsewhere you know to other jurisdiction we don't want to be registered at all you know and the final like kill or this idea was from the lawyers they said well potentially we could use the blockchain here but due to the uh current laws all the information should be stored on the server servers in the country so if you would like to do that you need to change this and that can be like a five-year project you know compared to the small case of all like we wanted to do the half year so guess which solution we preferred and that's like the illustration for what's what I have to deal with so uh that's what led me to think more about the vision you know how do we create like even of course I I see the point like it doesn't make sense to do a 200 people register your company register on the blockchain but it's just a start you know somebody needs to do this change in the norm somebody needs to start building different services and information it's kind of open ecosystem and stuff like that but nobody stated that as a task you know we just solve this small solution here and there so I was in the search for the vision and one of my friends from the undps celebration lab he recommended to use the foresight and basically the foresight is the like it's a research method it's the Community Development approach it's like really hard to tell in just few words but what it isn't for sure it's not a prediction you know it's not about like okay last year we earned 1 million dollars so next yeah maybe it's two million dollars it's rather about the different trends that can occur and how like they can pay out together you know what happens if all of them materialize or none of them materialize what then would happen who will win and so on so uh one of the key ideas is that it should be like systematic and participatory so for that we took each of a kind we took representatives from every Ministry you know from National Bank to cyber police we took parliamentaries every kind of business social ngos economists I would even like ecologists you know because that was also one of the insights there and we got them together in a set of like offline events and zoom calls to speak about what do they see what trends do they see what future or like what needs do they have and the second aspect of it is like we gathered all of that intelligence about the future for our long-term Vision process so we said like it's not for a year it's like 20 30 you know 10 years but many people in the ministry planning for 10 years it was like can't do but uh we strive for that and uh the two key trends that we identified whereas like first of all the asset tokenization you know whether it would grow or not and uh control our personality and in the our audience nobody believed that it won't grow everybody believed it would grow you know so we didn't even consider those scenarios but where the real fight happened is in the between this uh personality control so mostly people spoke about on the one hand the values of the security you know protection of like customers consumers and so on but on the other hand it's like Freedom you know no protection like we can lose our like uh freedom but that doesn't mean that we'll gain protection for sure you know so at one moment we just stand it on the line you know from the like security to freedom and people stated some arguments and other could you know change their place at this and we ended up you know like somewhere in the middle but closer to the freedom and the scenario would the metaphor for this scenario we call it digital Venice in the way of like golden age of trade you know open trade and prosperity lots of bridges between all of these systems and so on in comparison to digital dictatorship you know where Mass surveillance of course some maybe big Enterprises can win you know but for the Innovation for the consumers and so on it doesn't prove to be the best so this was our like Choice there and after that what initially happened is people started to like they saw all of that Community gathered around those ideas and they started to propose different projects you know we started to see like who's gonna need to do what you know what governments needs to do what business needs to do you know that set up the initial roadmap of our operations where people really proposed something what they wanted and by the end of like this six months extensive work I was super happy and I was like I saw a lot of the stakeholders we established all this contacts we had this developmental Vision it had this road map 70 Pages report extensive you know education happened through this you know people discussed you know like in National but what is D5 what is nft and stuff like that but one of the key ideas is that people build trust you know I had somebody selling like from the business oh this guy from the financial monitoring he's like adequate and nice you know we can probably speak to him and government also like our mental workers they had like okay this Founders entrepreneurs they're like okay they do some nice stuff so it created the initial basis for like human relations in this process and we also established a project office you know with all these experts in 11 working groups some of them already got funding for educational infrastructure and I was like on the high moment of it at that time and what you could think is what can go wrong you know after that well uh on February 24th the day that most of ukrainians will remember for long you know the war started and now after eight months it's kind of like a new normality you can say but the first months I felt like would I really like would I have to speak to like speaking to my close one would I have a chance to speak with them tomorrow I wasn't sure and all of this nice developmental plans they were also doomed you know who will think about this Innovation at this time so this is also like I recognized the moment we recognized in our team that we can't also lower hands you know this time required us to act and to do something and what was promising really is that on the base of the initial trust that people you know talking together a bunch of projects emerged that started to you know collect funding and one of such projects is called date for Ukraine it was under the ministry of digital transformation brand and supported by a few businesses you know so government accepted crypto and send it to the different purchases the key idea there was that the supply chain requirements were super high if they would need there would be need in like quadricopter or you know a car you would need it tomorrow you know so you don't have time to do this bureaucratic procedures or whatever so it's speeding up the processes a lot and the transparency of it and yeah that was the one the biggest one which collected around 60 million dollars from 50 000 people and you could see that ethereum ecosystem played a big role as well as like people the nature Giants around 300 but guys like Avital libertarian like in millions and so on so feel free to check it out and the other uh like projects were initiated by a set of like business owners they said like under our reputation we collect These funds it's just like important at the time many people like not only good actors activated but Bad actors activated where they collected like kind of for Ukraine you know but could you know just take this money so the brand of ministry or the brand of like business owners and so on it was really important for that and like Unchained funds they had this multi-seek you know they like we didn't have the time to build a full-scale you know down for everything but we try to keep the closest to that and you can see that the money was sent like for different causes we need to like be lean and agile there was many Grassroots uh you know initiatives that needed just small amounts of fun so there was like this people struggling in the other countries migration that they had no money to survive you know and uh they can't even always use their money for some reason so this help card so direct given was also a major thing and finally nfts nfts became like a real thing uh Ukraine dark of like one of the major they collected like more than six million and they decided to distribute those funds across the uh like trusted ngos because like from the external view don't know like who to donate to you know like we don't respect too much guys like Red Cross or somebody because they don't go this last mile to to the real you know like workplace and to help those people so the the like and for external they don't know where to give so they kind of created this connection where the Museum of War which connected both the aspect of like creativity to to the fundraising for the ministry we even got this crypto Bank we sold for 100k so first of all I would like to thank you a lot for as a community for everybody who supported it who donated who tracked who was with us in this hard moment after this you know nobody can say in Ukraine that crypto is like non-desirable or something so yeah just just for this moment thank you thank you so much sorry do I have time yeah I have some time I'm finishing sorry uh so uh what I proposed to like what we can do next is like uh like let's keep hacking you know like currently the uh like we we got bombed all the time you know now they like aiming at the uh like electrical and like water infrastructure and so on but that doesn't stop people from like coding and doing their work you know they work like in the underground hotel they keep hacking just recently there was like a hackathon in here where vitalik was and uh people were like thinking about the solution that can be just like now we need it in Ukraine but tomorrow you know who knows which country already like if you look at the security aspect of the DLT like in Georgia or Taiwan they already are thinking about the cyber attacks that can happen in our country it's also like quite a big problem and uh it's also a bunch of migration challenges because of course like National Banks they try to like secure macro situation you know but also people can't always you know transfer money or like open the bank account and uh in our vision we're looking to to move all of this ownership right system to distrusted ecosystems and just like as a final note what what I learned through all of this experience you know what I hope you can use in your work as well is that uh without the vision you know that won't work you know we'll be still disconnected and what we do and uh what we achieved is like the sound sense of the shared future and the community who was like experiencing this shared future is like in the world we all became kind of dull like everybody started to work despite any conflicts and second is that uh well while technology can be neutral in a way you know like but uh with the same technology you can use you can build either a dictatorship or like Venice whatever like democracy so and for that there should be a demand like understanding from the people like currently just you know if you present one percent you know we need more people to really kind of request it from the politicians and politicians that they move it it's kind of a long process but without this like win-win interaction and consent consensus it just won't happen and in our approach we saw that raising awareness and education was key you know people just if if they don't get it they don't trust it so currently we're launching a program to get like by 2030 more than a half of ukrainians crypto literate and we're now education governmental workers how to use metamask and stuff like that so they will have practical skills they will see it so that would really help us in the like or everybody help in the crisis so people will already rely and know that so on that note I thank you again let's connect you have an LA in the Ukraine government in me if you want to do something together please find me or connect I will be really happy to help thank you foreign