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Sergey Tokarev: How ZibraAI’s NFT project helps raise money to support war-affected Ukrainians

Ukrainian deep-tech startup ZibraAI plans to raise funds for the largest charitable funds Unchain.fund and Dobro.ua that will be used to help families affected by the Russian invasion. The project is called Sirens and is an NFT gallery that will include 1991 artworks created using artificial intelligence (AI). Each of these works is a tribute to the courage of Ukrainians who oppose the aggressor country. In total, the gallery will include 150 significant events that happened during this war. Sergey Tokarev, a founding partner at Roosh, a company with a portfolio of several AI and ML projects, including ZibraAI, explains the details of the charity initiative.

How did the project come into being?

The name of the project was not chosen randomly. The sirens are the first thing that most Ukrainian citizens heard in the early morning of February 24, 2022. A lot of occupied cities and villages are on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe now. Thousands of Ukrainians were killed, millions were forced to leave the country or become internally displaced persons, and many lost their homes all over the constant missile and artillery attacks.

As Sasha Petrenko, CEO at ZibraAI, notes, the idea of the initiative is to pay tribute to the heroic struggle of Ukrainians against the aggressor and preserve the events of this war in the blockchain forever.

Working in the field of machine learning and content generation technologies, the project ZibraAI decided to launch a charity initiative and raise money for the war victims. The startup developed a neural network pipeline creating images from the text description. According to Sergey Tokarev, the team selected over 150 events in the history of Ukraine that had taken place during the 4 months of the war, for example, the attack of the “Russian Warship” on Zmiinyi (Snake) Island and the battle for Antonov Airport. Then, these events got appropriate descriptions and were input into the neural network generating the “Sirens” gallery.

In total, the gallery includes 1991 images to be released as NFTs. Tokarev notes that the team is planning three separate drops that will be up for sale. The first two consist of 661 NFTs each and will be available on OpenSea. For the third drop on Near, the team prepared 669 NFTs. The price for the art pieces starts at $100.

How will the money be used?

According to Sergey Tokarev, all the proceeds of the sales will be sent directly to the funds Dobro.ua and Unchain.fund. To do this, the project team integrated the funds crypto wallets into a smart contract of the NFT sales.

All funds raised from selling the Sirens NFT gallery will be used to help children and families who were forced to leave their homes over the war and now live in shelters for internally displaced persons, as well as elderly people who have no one to support them. In addition, assistance will be provided to people who are forced to stay in the occupied and non-occupied territories that are on the verge of a humanitarian catastrophe, as well as medical institutions providing help to those affected by the hostilities.