Michael Chobanian: Ukraine and Bitcoin Are Really Coming Together

Ukraine is heavily leaning towards crypto now that Russia has invaded. The economy and the financial systems of the country have become destabilized in recent weeks, and crypto appears to be the big answer the nation is looking for according to Michael Chobanian, the president of the Blockchain Association of Ukraine and founder of the Kuna Exchange.

Michael Chobanian Says Ukraine Is Really Integrating Crypto

Kuna is a platform utilized by the Ukrainian government to set up wallets so it could accept crypto donations for the military and other supplies. At the time of writing, more than $50 million has been received. Prior to his work in crypto, Michael primarily worked in the tech world of Ukraine, though now things have changed significantly. He said in a recent interview:

Yes. I was working at a telecom company. I oversaw business development. We were the first company to launch 3G in Ukraine. It was based on the CDMA standard, the American standard, while Europe was GSM. At the time that was quite amazing. A couple of months later, I saw that mobile traffic was growing fast. I also had data on fiber optic — the fixed-line internet — and I saw that traffic was not growing as fast there. For me, it was obvious that everything was going to go mobile, especially after the iPhone was released. That was when I was really starting to get interested in using mobile as the universal key to the digital world.

Michael is an extremely educated person. He went to the London Business School and Columbia Business School. From there, he transferred to the University of Hong Kong to get his MBA degree. It was here where he found himself getting into web analytics and web design, though a few years later, he would step into the world of bitcoin. He commented:

I found out about bitcoin around 2011, during one of the projects we were developing about digital banks. At the time, they did not exist in Ukraine and there were only a few examples in the world, so we were doing marketing research on what was happening with the money in the world. It was the global financial system with a lot of banks with electronic money, a lot of institutions. Bitcoin couldn’t fit into any of the bubbles that we drew. I asked my guys, ‘What the hell is bitcoin?’ They said, ‘This is digital currency, fully decentralized. It has nothing to do with the fiat system.’ I was like, ‘What is a fiat system?’

Slow to Get Involved

Despite knowing about it, he wouldn’t get heavily involved in bitcoin for another two years until the Cypriot financial crisis occurred.

The government was after people’s money and many citizens were worried, so a lot of them – including Michael – began investing in BTC.

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