(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- The spot where a statue of Lenin once presided over Kyiv’s downtown is now in a state of mild decrepitude. The plinth remains, but it’s covered with graffiti, its steps painted the blue and gold of the Ukrainian flag. After protesters triumphantly toppled the statue in December 2013, the vacant pedestal served as a memorial to Ukraine’s violent rejection of its Soviet past.
Since late September, though, the spot has had a new occupant—of sorts. If you point your phone at the pedestal, an app will show you an augmented-reality rendering of the person some say symbolizes the country’s future: Satoshi Nakamoto, the anonymous inventor of Bitcoin. “He could be Ukrainian,” says Alexander Soroka, head of local incubator Startup.Network and co-founder of Satoshi Nakamoto Republic, an organization created to erect AR statues to Nakamoto around the world. If he can win the mayor’s support, he plans eventually to put up a permanent statue in its place. Soroka is correct about Nakamoto: No one knows where he (or she, or they) is from or what he looks like; the statue design shows three human torsos, each with a different skin tone, sprouting from a pair of robot legs. But Soroka is also speaking figuratively, describing how neatly Bitcoin serves the needs of a citizenry with an historic distrust of the state.
Before the protests, which came to be known as the Maidan uprising, Ukraine’s cryptocurrency scene was mostly underground, hidden from the prying eyes of then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s brutal security services. Revolutionaries toppled his government in 2014, but the country remains embroiled in a war with Russian-backed separatists. Its currency, the hryvnia, collapsed to a record low against the dollar in early 2015 and has stayed weak ever since. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley companies opened offices in Kyiv to take advantage of its cheap rents and abundant skilled labor. About 100,000 Ukrainian engineers contract remotely for Silicon Valley companies, and thousands more do so as under-the-table freelancers. You couldn’t design a more ideal environment for the rise of blockchain-based digital currencies if you tried.
