Alexei Navalny, Russia’s leading critic of the current Kremlin administration, has attracted a serious amount of cryptocurrency in the form of anonymous donations for his corruption-combatting NGO. The digital coins collected since the beginning of this year have amounted to well over $700,000 at current prices.
Also read: Russian Tax Authority Registers Crypto as Part of a Company’s Capital
Anti-Corruption Foundation Collects 110 BTC in 2019
Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (abbr. FBK in Russian), which investigates alleged cases of high-profile corruption in Russia, has received 109.6 BTC between Jan. 1 and Dec. 1, 2019, the Russian edition of RT reported this week. At the time of writing, that’s close to 49 million rubles or around $780,000. The bulk of the donations have been made between April and September, during the run-up to the Moscow city council election.
The TV channel tracks all transactions to the wallet used by FBK since 2017. The BTC address 3QzYvaRFY6bakFBW4YBRrzmwzTnfZcaA6E, which belongs to Navalny’s campaign manager Leonid Volkov, was initially published on the “Navalny 20!8” website after his bid for last year’s presidential election was announced in 2016. It was meant to be used until the candidate’s team registered an official fundraising account but supporters have continued to send crypto funds to this day.
A quick check using the Bitcoin.com block explorer shows that over 638 BTC (approximately $4.5 million today) has been deposited so far and that most of the money has been withdrawn already. The current balance stands at around 0.05 BTC after a total of 2,770 transactions. According to RT, 262.4 BTC were sent to the wallet in 2017 and another 242.2 BTC were deposited during the following
