How Russian activists fight for gender equality with NFTs | Interview with Pussy Riot’s co-founder

This is Nadia Tolokonnikova. She is part of a Russian punk.

Rock collective called pussy riot.

In 2012, she captured the world's attention for staging a protest against Vladimir Putin in Moscow's largest Orthodox church. Since then, Pusy Riot has continued using performance art to oppose political repression.

In Russia, people like me are labeled as extremists or terrorists.

Nadia is now actively using cryptocurrency to promote her cause.

The video of her music single Panic Attack sold for over half a million dollars as an NFT series. In 2021, I wanted to bring a.

Large, large human rights and charitable component to NFTs.

In Cointelegraph's latest interview, we talked to Nadia about how PussyRiot is using NFTs as a tool for achieving social and political change.

So, first of all, Nadia, I'm curious, how did you take your first steps in crypto and in the NFT space in particular?

I was always a section of culture and tech because I believe that activists have to learn about what's going on with technology in order to be effective. So I have a group of friends who are pretty deeply involved in the NFTs since, well, since late 2019, maybe earlier, and hearing lots of great stuff from them. That's how I got involved. I dropped my first NFT in March 2021. And the reason why I decided to become active in the space because I wanted to bring a large, large human rights and charitable component to NFTs, because I quickly realized that it's a space where people are open to hearing your thoughts. It's really flexible. It's a new, it's relatively new space. So that's why you can actually establish precedence with your own behavior. And initially I was pretty hesitant about entering the MT space. There's a lot of abdicos for various reasons. My main reason was homogeneity of the space. So due to various historical reasons, crypto is mostly owned by men, by white men, white heterosexual men. And those are not my demographics. Unless I need a dick, I don't really interact with them. So I had a hard time actually entering the space because I was thinking how I'm going to fit Bill within that community. And then I started to connect with various groups of LGBTQ groups and women in crypto space and we talked about them promoting their activist issues for a while within crypto space and then realized that actually it's just like that from the surface. And they seem right now is unfortunately really, really daunting, but we can change that. So I decided that I'm going to join to make the statistics better and maybe in the future onboard more women and LGBTQ folks into the space.

So what would you say is the main utility of crypto for a political activist like you?

There are a lot of reasons why an activist would want to use crypto. I think first is because crypto, it's a great tool to transfer money without being controlled by the government if you don't want to. And there is a problem with interacting with financial system when you're living under press government. So I'm from Russia and I'm fighting with my government for the last, say, 17 years, more than half of my life. And it's becoming harder and harder for us to fight with the government because they're using everything they have to process, including financial tools. So it's not even difficult to raise money when you, when you're critical to your government in Russia. But also it's even difficult to use money that you already have in your bank account because often your bank account would be frozen because you are labeled as terrorist or extremists by the court decision. So legally, technically, everything is right and legal. And technically, according to the constitution, they're protecting people from dangerous subjects. Myself, so people like me are labeled as extremists or terrorists. So it becomes really difficult to deal with any infrastructure, logistics. So we need to build something on our own. And definitely crypto has been a great tool to transfer money. So there is that. But also for raising money I mentioned, it's difficult to even have money as an activist in Russia, but it's even more difficult to raise money because one of the tools, how our government oppresses us is frightening individuals who want to donate money to our cause effectively, if you donate any sum that is considered as a large sum, which could be even $500 to my cause, you can be considered an extremist as well in my country. So if you don't protect yourself, if you don't encrypt this interaction, then you're fucked. So we don't want our supporters to suffer. That's why. For a while, actually. So, yeah, you've been asking me about how we used, have we used crypto before? Before NFTs. So that's how we've been using it for a while. We have ETH and bitcoin wallets on our website so people can donate anonymously. I believe that you're not going to be ineffective activists here don't have global network of supporters. Well, this is true for my movement. So that's how we rolled since day one. But crypto gave us tools to actually empower ourselves and reach a much bigger amount of people than before.

So talking about NFTs specifically, you became very much involved in the NFT space since the start of 2010. And in March you sold NFTs in order to raise money for victims of domestic violence, women that were victim of domestic violence. Can you tell us about that initiative? How did it go?

It was called Panic Attack and It consists of four pieces. And the first ever piece went for 100 East. It was Amir Mondo who bought it. And then total price of four pieces was 178 piece. So that's how we entered the space. So we raised quite a large sum for domestic, domestic shelter for victims of domestic violence. And we were able to transport a lot of women outside of Russia because the shelter was located in one of the southern republics of Russia. I cannot name the exact one because. Because of security reasons, because of safety reasons.

So I'm sure that you were raising funds for social causes even before NFTs. So what is the novelty here? What is the advantage the NFTs bring for this kind of fundraising purposes in social political activism?

NFTs are opening up us to new capital because we have large amount of supporters, but most of them, they don't own a lot of money. So crypto space is a really interesting space because not everyone, but a lot of people who happen to be early adopters in crypto, they care about the world, they care about how the future is going to look like. They don't think about what's going on, how, how are they going to enjoy their money today, but they also think about how they're going to enjoy how future generations are going to enjoy this planet in 100 years from now. So it's a really pretty incredible community of people who own large amount of money because they just bought Ethereum or Bitcoin when it used to cost nothing. And at the same time, a lot of them care about actual causes. So that's the new development.

So we can say that Pussy Riot activity is at the intersection between political activism and art and performance art. So we talked about the political and the activism side of that. Now let's talk about the art. How are NFTs useful for your art?

To me, as an artist, it's really valuable that digital art for the first time was actually recognized as valid art. I know that there's been some digital pieces exposed at museums and galleries before, but generally as an artist who works only with digital assets since the very beginning of my career, I never, I never got. I never produced any physical piece, so just had really hard time communicating to museums and galleries like where is my value as an artist if I could not bring anything physical to the gallery? And this NFT movement made me feel seen and happy and supported because it connected me with other digital artists and just exposed me to this community of other people who experienced the same problem and also at the same time expose us to a community of collectors who see real balloon art in digital world.

Now, let's address some of the concerns around the NFT space. So I'm sure that you know about all the concerns regarding the environmental problems caused by NFTs, the energy consumption that is involved with the creation of NFTs. So what is your take on that?

Well, there are a lot of NFTs. There are ways to mint NFTs on different blockchains and you don't necessarily have to pick Ethereum. You can mint on Tezos or Solana and they use Proof of Stake, which is much more environmentally friendly. A concern with Ethereum is a very valid concern. And that is a big question to me when I just started using Ethereum as a blockchain to mint my NFTs on. What I decided is there's a question, it's not really fair to make artists responsible for that. I think it's a question to the fossil fuel industry and it's a question to the way how we extract energy. As humanity and as an activist, I am committed to working on switching to renewable sources of energy. And also besides that, I know that Ethereum is going to switch to Proof of Stake and they have it in their roadmap now.

You're not using NFTs just to promote single causes. You are also actively building your community within the NFT space. And this community is particularly focused on on LGBTQ people and women. Can you explain what is the purpose of this project?

The problem that we're trying to solve is a problem of representation of women and LGBTQ people in the NFC space. We believe that we're still pretty early in this space. We actually have chances to change it dramatically. So our goal is to change the statistics of when it comes to NFT sales. When you compare women and men, maybe you remember months ago, NFT now posted this terrible statistics that women artists are accountable for only 5% of all NFT sales throughout the last year. She really said it's combined both of women's work being cheaper and also women are not participating equally with men in this space. And the goal of Pussyverse is going to be to change that. And we're going to see. It's going to be really interesting to compare the statistics in a year from now because we're super serious but making this work. And it's going to be a combination of onboarding more feminine LGBTQ folks in space and also at the same time working with collectors. Not necessarily women and lgbtq, but collectors can be whoever, whoever. Like we are going to work with male allies as well. It's going to be interesting to compare statistics. Obviously we're not the only player who is trying to change it, but I think if we combine our efforts, we really can change it and establish a new paradigm in this space. Because when it comes to traditional art world, it would be pretty much impossible for just a comparatively small group of people to try to change the whole landscape. But the NFT world is still so small, I feel like with a good enough effort, you can actually change it.

Okay, so that's very interesting. Can you give us more details about this dao that you are building and how you are concretely going to achieve the goals that you mentioned?

We didn't announce anything yet for a reason because we want to do a lot of work behind the scenes before we announce the structure of it. But right now I can just state that we have intentions of creating this dao for women and LGBTQ people that's going to combine already established artists in space and up and coming artists. Basically. I think the closest you can get a taste of what it's going to be with what I'm already doing. If you take a look at pussyright, Twitter, I highlight quite often new artists coming into the space who I personally help to onboard. Tell them about Metamask, Coinbase, how you establish that paying for their gas fees, because as you mentioned, they often can be really expensive to kick off their journey in the energy space. And another part of what I'm doing is trying to find collectors for them because initially I was just jump starting their journey into the space and then I saw a couple of times that there is not enough interest. And I think it's a combination of two factors that most of the collectors, they're still men and they're really into brotherhood, which is really good. So another part of my job is to find empathetic collectors, either men or women, doesn't matter who actually can feel that and support up and coming female artists. So yeah, that's what I've been doing so far. And we're going to continue to work on that, but I want to scale it because I think these efforts that I've been doing over the last year, they're nice and valid, but one person only can change that much. So I'm going to hire the whole team who are going to create educational materials for girls who want to enter the space and people who are going to be just problem shooting if someone has any technical questions. And also another part of our effort is to find collectors.

And now another concern regarding the NFT market specifically. So a lot of people are saying that it's a bubble and that the market is overheated and that it cannot continue like that for much longer. It will eventually crash. So are you not concerned that if that happens, then you won't be able to use NFTs as, as that efficient method for fundraising as before?

It's possible. You never want to put all your eggs in one basket. And we have other ways to raise money for our activism. I don't think you should only hold everything just in one place, but that's been said. I'm positive that the value of art is not going anywhere. And despite focusing on working with real artists, I personally love to focus on community building and on creating great art. And I think in the long term, these two are going to be long term time investments. And I never really cared that much about money. I cared mostly about building good community. And if money are going to follow that, good. If they don't, that's fine with me as well.