Day 109. Trustless Evidence.
Ukraine DAO is helping the Starling Lab document russian war crimes.
Hey everyone.
Sorry for the long break since the last post - was busy on other fronts.
Today I’d like to tell you about one of Ukraine DAO’s most important partnerships - the Starling Lab. Helping them could easily be some of the most impactful work we’ve done.
The Starling Lab use blockchain to record and store the world’s most important information - evidence of war crimes and genocide. The data collected by our Ukrainian team in Kharkiv has now been submitted to the International Criminal Court, which is unprecedented for a DAO. Huge thank you to Oleksii Karpovych and Alexander Sharma for this incredible work.
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The Starling Framework for Data Integrity
The Starling Framework for Data Integrity is a joint project between the USC Shoah Foundation and Stanford University’s Department of Electrical Engineering.
They are innovating with the latest cryptographic methods and decentralized web protocols to meet the technical and ethical challenges of establishing trust in our most sensitive digital records, such as the documentation of human rights violations, war crimes, and testimony of genocide.
You can learn more about it by watching this video and visiting the Starling Lab’s official website.
How did Ukraine DAO’s work with the Starling Lab start?
A couple of months ago, our press secretary called me and said that she knew of a Web3 project that I was absolutely going to love. That’s how I was introduced to Jonathan, the director of the Starling Lab who’s now become a dear friend to me.
You may know him as the producer of the first season of the HBO show "Silicon Valley" (very excited to watch it, btw). The path from Silicon Valley to leading a Stanford-backed blockchain project is covered in this article.
Long story short: Jonathan and his team developed a technology that allows storing data about war crimes and genocide on an immutable ledger that no one can tamper with. Not even russia.
Treating Ukraine with respect
Apart from the immense utility of Starling Lab's technology for Ukraine, there are a couple more reasons why it's so important for everyone to support this project:
50% of the budget for their Project “Dokaz” (“Dokaz” means “proof” in Ukrainian) is dedicated to Ukrainian talents. I've been helping them with "Dokaz" free of charge but I always want to make sure that the Ukrainians doing the most dangerous and important part of the work are adequately compensated.
There is a lot of integrity and ethics behind how Starling Lab’s team are going about their work in Ukraine. Like any Ukrainian person right now, I’m heartbroken, often angry and sometimes very sensitive. Starling Lab’s conduct from what I’ve seen has been absolutely exemplary and I wish all specialists working with Ukrainians had the same levels of genuine empathy.
Our President Volodymyr Zelensky recently said Ukraine will "find every bastard who shot at our cities, our people, who bombed our land, who launched rockets. There will be no quiet place on this earth for you. Except for the grave.
We will not forgive the shooting of unarmed people. Destruction of our infrastructure.
We. Will. Not. Forgive. Hundreds and hundreds of victims. Thousands and thousands of sufferings. And God will not forgive. Not today. Not tomorrow.
Never. And instead of Forgiveness, there will be a Day of Judgment.
I'm sure of it.”
Huge thank you to the Starling Lab team for helping make sure justice is served for Ukraine and thank you everyone for reading this.
#StandWithUkraine
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Great! That’s a very important and also huge piece of work you are doing! Thank you!