Developers of NFT project named after Volodymyr Zelenskyy suspected of fraud and ties to Russia

A joint investigation by Molfar analysts and AIN.UA editorial staff revealed that the authors of the ZelenskiyNFT NFT project are probably Russian fraudsters.

As the experts found out, the ZelenskiyNFT project was created by the IamUkraine studio, which «simply does not exist» outside the project, and the alleged studio does not even have its own website or any social media for communication. The co-founders of the project are Maxim Boyko and Dmitriy Rantsevich, a Russian and a Belarusian.

The ZelenskiyNFT collection consists of 10,000 NFT images of President Zelensky. Interestingly, the project team does not have any official permissions or agreements with the government. There are no NFTs with Zelenskyi on the website of the NFT Museum, which was created at the initiative of the Ministry of Digital Transformation.

The collection is sold on OpenSea, the largest platform for the sale and purchase of NFTs (whose representatives have previously reported that they are stepping up their fight against fraudsters) and aims to «raise funds for the needs of charitable foundations in Ukraine and the EU.» However, the rhetoric of the project varies depending on how and to whom the message is targeted: the advertisement states that part of the funds will be transferred to the Ukrainian army, while the website states that ZelenskiyNFT is aimed at humanitarian needs and will not support military purposes. At the same time, they promise to transfer only 60% of the profits to the needs of the funds.

Experts also drew attention to the languages used to communicate with the project’s Telegram channel and Discord community: Russian and English. The Telegram channel for communication in Ukrainian is called the «Ukrainian channel,» but updates are published in Russian as well.

The No Worries editorial team urges to trust only official fundraising funds, charitable organizations, and NFT projects. For example, the United24 fundraising platform (launched by Volodymyr Zelenskyy himself), Serhiy Prytula’s charity foundation (which raised UAH 600 million for bypasses, 8 million of which came in cryptocurrency), the NFT collection for cryptocurrency donations to the army created by the Azov battalion, and the charity collection of non-fungible tokens «Dial 103 — Save a Life» from Binance-zapustyt-nft-kolekcziyu-dlya-dopomogy-ukrayinczyam/">Binance and the United Ukraine Foundation.