Support for compatriots and global scaling: Volodymyr Nosov, WhiteBIT CEO, spoke about doing business during the war
Despite the war, Ukrainian business is fighting on the local economic front and is actively scaling into foreign markets. Thus, the largest European crypto exchange WhiteBIT, based in Kharkov, continues the global expansion of blockchain technology and participates in many charitable projects in support of Ukraine and Ukrainians. The owner and CEO of WhiteBIT, Volodymyr Nosov, spoke about this in an interview.
“When the war started, we immediately turned off trading pairs with the Russian ruble, blocked deposits, withdrawal of rubles and registration for users from Russia. Our team considers it unethical to do business with an aggressor country,” Volodymyr Nosov recalls.
Instead, WhitBIT stepped up its expansion into foreign markets. In recent months, Nosov has opened a representative office in Spain, Portugal, Turkey and Georgia, and has also expanded the business to the Australian continent. This fall, WhitBIT is taking the next step in the development of the project by launching its own WBT token.
Now the WhiteBIT cryptocurrency exchange unites more than 3 million users from 150 countries of the world. Included in the top 2 security exchanges in the world based on an independent audit by Hacken and has an AAA rating. About 500 specialists work in the WhiteBIT team.
“A significant part of our team is located in Ukraine. They are in constant contact with volunteers from those regions of our country that are most affected by shelling or are under temporary occupation,” Volodymyr Nosov says.
In such regions, Ukrainians are experiencing serious humanitarian problems: there are no medicines, food, or clothing. Many families lost a roof over their heads: their houses were destroyed by the invaders. As part of helping Ukrainians affected by the war, WhiteBIT raised and donated about $4 million. In addition, the company has established partnerships with Ukrainian government agencies.
“For example, within the framework of the memorandum of cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we provide technical and organizational assistance to the consular service of Ukraine in countries where there are WhiteBIT offices. We support the Anti-Crisis Center of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a round-the-clock call center, we have technically equipped the mobile groups of the ministry,” Volodymyr Nosov explains.
We will remind you that WhiteBIT recently successfully launched its own WBT token, which caused an unprecedented stir in the crypto market. On the first day of trading, 1 million tokens were sold in just 15 minutes. During the listing, the WBT token was traded by more than 100k users from 80 countries of the world, and the number of requests in some places exceeded 800k per minute. The value of the token has increased many times: from $1.9 at the start to $5.5 in just a few hours of trading.