BAYC donates $1M in Ethereum to the Ukrainian Government

As donations continue to troop in for Ukraine amidst the invasion, the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT collection announced on Tuesday that it has contributed $1 million to Ukraine’s official Ethereum wallet address.

The information was released on the NFT collection’s Twitter account, along with an Etherscan transaction link showing that it had sent 388.999 ETH (just over $1 million) after being motivated by its community members’ contributions.

NFTs are one-of-a-kind tokens that exist on a blockchain like Ethereum and represent asset ownership. The BAYC was one of the first NFT collections to attain a floor price of over 50 ETH per NFT (or minimum “buy-now” price).

The BAYC has since become a cultural emblem in the NFT sphere, with celebrities such as Eminem, Steph Curry, Jimmy Fallon, and others “aping” the collection.

According to OpenSea’s statistics, the BAYC is currently the second-largest NFT collection of all time, with over 417,000 ETH ($1 billion) in secondary sales.

Following the BAYC gift to Ukraine, a slew of additional Web3 communities—from DAOs to memecoin holders to NFT collections—announced programs and initiatives aimed at helping Ukraine.

According to data compiled by Merkle Science, Ukraine has received over $88 million in cryptocurrency donations to date, and the government presently has roughly $7 million in Ethereum in its wallet.