How Blockchain Revolutionized Modern Warfare: Lessons from Ukraine

On the second day of Blockchain Economy London Summit, Crypto news attended a talk by Patrick Sweeney, CEO of DaVinci 3.0 and a Wall Street Journal best-selling author.

Sweeney discussed how blockchain had changed the dynamics of the Ukraine conflict.

Blockchain and crypto adoption in Ukraine

Patrick Sweeney, emphasized the importance of courage in dealing with uncertainty, a quality that early adopters of technology possess.

He pointed it out 17% of Ukraine’s population have access to crypto wallets or have traded, making them one of the largest countries in the world in terms of crypto adoption.

This started before the war, when President Zelenskyy signed a law on digital assets, creating a safe harbor with little regulation, thus allowing Ukraine to benefit from blockchain technology.

Sweeney explained how the Digital Assets Act enabled a quick, easy and simple way to help finance the war, with over 70 million dollars of cryptocurrency donations received during the conflict so far, with some estimates reaching as high as 200 million dollars.

The Ukrainian government set up nine of its own wallets, not just Bitcoin, so people could donate Ethereum, Polkadot or even Solana.

In the first few weeks, Ukraine collected about $50 million in crypto, with donations from all over the world.

In addition, different technologies such as NFTs were used for collection.

For example, the famous anti-Putin group Pussy Riot produced a single NFT of the Ukrainian flag, which was hoisted 7.1 million dollars.

Using blockchain technology to document evidence

During his talk, Sweeney also discussed how blockchain technology is being used to document alleged war crimes in Ukraine.

This is done through a project developed by the University of Southern California, in collaboration with the Starling Lab at Stanford and Hala Systems, a technology-driven social enterprise.

The project uses blockchain to create a decentralized system for document digital evidence which is then sent to the Office of the Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court.

To create a permanent and tamper-proof record of the evidence, Starling Lab took evidence scraped from sources like Telegram and added relevant context about where and when the information came from.

The data was then “hashed” to create a digital fingerprint, and the hash values ​​were posted to seven different blockchain protocols to create a distributed verification key for the file.

Using a public blockchain, the information is recorded on thousands of computers independently at about the same time, making it difficult to manipulate the data later.

Although this method cannot verify the underlying image, it creates one permanent record of what it looked like at the time it was hashed, to ensure that no one can change the information later or have evidence thrown out on suspicion that it may have been tampered with afterwards.

This use of blockchain technology could revolutionize the way war crimes are documented and prosecuted, potentially increasing accountability and promoting justice.