Ukraine is one of those countries that may have mixed perception, thus have to be explained by a person who is actually living here, someone like me. We’ll start from the mindset and then smoothly move on to why it’s going to explode soon (in a good way obviously).

Even though it’s not a part of EU, Ukraine is the biggest country in Europe. A lot of people didn’t know about its existence prior to Crimea incident. However still most of the people are not aware we are on the map.

There are two major things that make us unique: corruption and badass IT specialists. Let’s go through both of them.

Corruption

Ukrainians have one of the lowest salaries in the world (about $150-$300 a month). I know there are worse samples in Africa and South America but still this is not fun if you think about it.

This fact causes people who work in government-based jobs (doctors, teachers, police officers) to take bribes just to survive. Since 2008 the cost of living, including utility bills, rent, gas and even groceries have increased multiple times, while the salaries have decreased at similar speed.

At the same time, most of the parents are acting stupid letting their kids to own an iPhone and to eat out at the restaurants. I still don’t understand where this behavior is coming from.

IT specialists

Most of the US and European companies outsource product development in Ukraine and Russia. The primary reason — it’s 2–3 times cheaper than to hold a dev team in their region, however the quality is a lot higher which makes it a good deal.

Apparently, those guys earn a decent amount of money and manage to save a lot due to a simplified taxation policy (5% income tax). That means that a middle backend dev can make $2k-$3 a month, while spending only $600 for all of his needs.

I know there are other important things to mention about Ukraine, like the growth of Instagram influencers, the number of fabulous girls, the broken roads, the dying agriculture but those two are the most important for the intro.

Payments in Ukraine

The payment atmosphere in Ukraine is rather diverse. But to get a full picture, you need to know only 4 things.

1. We still don’t have an access to the most popular payment platforms, like PayPal, Stripe, Venmo, and it’s quite challenging to make bank wire transfers across EU also. Apparently, that prevents us from creating any international business, which sounds tough.

2. Most of the people are storing their money in foreign currencies (dollar, euro) and exchange them when needed. It’s a lot safer that way because of exchange rate fluctuations. On top of that there’s an ATM withdrawal limit of about $200, which makes it a lot practical not to store money in local currency, not alone bank account.

3. Speaking of banks, we don’t trust them. In the last 3 years more than 100 banks were closed without repaying back to their customers. The only bank people still trust somehow (blows my mind by the way) is our biggest bank PrivatBank that recently became government based. That means that all of the people’s operations are now recorded and monitored by the government. That doesn’t feel right to me. One day people will get hurt.

4. At the same time, we are getting used to Paypass technologies, including Apple Pay and Google Pay. People switch to digital payments and tend to carry less cash in their pocket due to convenience. I assume that has something to do with Cashless Economy plan that NBU has as the part of their strategy.

If you look at that from multiple angles, it seems like government doing whatever they can to prevent people from using cash and forcing them to use cards. The only reason obviously is to take control over our lives. If all of the payments become digital, then we have nothing to hide, thus everything is transparent. Smart.

Cryptocurrency payments in Ukraine

Due to low salaries and curious tech guys, cryptocurrency got rather early in our country. In fact, one of my friends offered me to mine Bitcoin back in 2011. I was stupid 16-year old guy so I said no, which pisses me off all the time but I got used to that.

There are lots of achievements worth mentioning as well:

• Ukraine has the biggest crypto community in Eastern Europe.
• The first mining chips were developed in Ukraine.
• One of the biggest mining pools (Bitfury) was developed by Ukrainian guys.
• The first and biggest conference in Europe was held in Ukraine.
• Ukrainian crypto startups raise millions of dollars and create amazing products that are used by the whole world.
• Top blockchain projects most of the time are developed by Ukrainian developers (Cardano, ProximaX, Stellar, Dash, Bitfury).
• The first public and legal cryptocurrency exchange in Eastern Europe (Kuna) was created in Ukraine.

I wasn’t kidding when I told we have the smartest IT specialists in the world.

Anyways, when it comes to cryptocurrency payments, there are over 100 places that already accept cryptocurrency.

The coolest part is that different merchants have different interfaces through which the customer can pay with this weird digital money. Some of them use plugins for point of sale system, the others have a plain QR code, there are a few with dedicated merchant app, and some use a web invoicing system.

At the moment I’m a part of a team that does all of that, I can tell you for fact Ukraine is going to explode soon. It took baby steps in 2018 but the next year is going to be awesome.

Legal framework in Ukraine

In order to have an explosive growth of cryptocurrency as a form of payments in Ukraine, there got to be some form of legal framework. It’s not there yet but we do have multiple proposals that are currently under review by our government. They all have different pros and cons but if one of them gets approval, we’re about to see a lot of international companies coming to Ukraine which will finally create a healthy investment situation.

Although the official legal framework is not there yet, it doesn’t stop projects who work in this space to put in the work. They create their own frameworks that don’t interfere with existing laws and it seems to be working.

To sum up, Ukraine has a poor economy but very smart people. We already proved this world that we’re worth something. It’s a matter of time when we, not California, will become crypto Silicon Valley.