Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb 24th, 2022. In response, the Developer DAO for Ukraine project was born.

You may now donate directly to Ukrainian humanitarian efforts by minting an animated NFT until May 23rd at ukraine.developerdao.com.

We will put your donations to immediate use. Even once the conflict is over, there will continue to be long-term work to support victims with humanitarian relief.

We will donate all proceeds from minting your NFT to Unchain. Unchain's ten principles align with our Developer DAO values, and they offer full transparency around how they spend donations.

The goal of this project is to donate to the people of Ukraine. However, it's also possible we will add other utilities in the future for owners of this NFT. The Developer DAO Derivatives team continues to brainstorm ideas for future projects, such as wearables and games.

Please join us on the Developer DAO Discord if you have ideas or want to participate on the team.

Building the Donation Site and Contract

Just two days before the invasion, the Developer DAO Derivatives team released their Pixel Devs project on Polygon for DAO members to mint their visual NFT. For more details, check out the Pixel Devs blog post.

The team started to brainstorm how to repurpose the Pixel Devs technology to offer the sale of NFTs to raise money for Ukraine's humanitarian efforts. However, we realized early on that we can't repurpose our existing tech directly for this project.

We have to make multiple changes to make the Pixel Devs usable for this project.

1. Create a new design loosely based on Pixel Devs' art style. The final NFT is also an animated 3D card, not a still image.
2. Open donation to everyone and not limit it to DAO members.
3. Create a new user interface. A donation website interface is different from a minting site based on character attributes.
4. Create a new Smart Contract. There are a lot of changes here.
   • Instead of minting a unique set of 8000 NFTs, we want to mint unlimited donations with five unique NFT designs representing donation levels.
   • We support royalties, so a percentage of secondary sales also becomes a donation.
   • Blockchains are great tools for transparency. We wanted to make sure the donation process was secure and transparent so that donors could see where their money was going. All proceeds would go to vetted organizations in Ukraine.

The Developer DAO's mission focuses on education, and this was undoubtedly an exciting learning project for all those involved. It also attracted new DAO members to jump in and donate their time to building this.

Our code is available on GitHub.