Ethereum's Russian-born cofounder has been quietly supporting a DAO that raised $8 million in crypto for Ukraine. His dad is even more involved.

Alona Shevchenko was terrified when she learnt that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his army were planning to invade Ukraine.

Shevchenko, 28, a Ukrainian living in the United Kingdom with family in Ukraine, first learned of the impending invasion on Jan. 19 from a buddy with contacts to Ukrainian intelligence services, according to Fortune.

"I had a really difficult time in the weeks leading up to the invasion and had a big mental breakdown," Shevchenko said, "knowing that the invasion was about to happen and the public was mostly blind to that."

She protested for weeks in front of the Russian embassy in London. She wrote a blog entry about the war in the United Kingdom on February 21.

But Shevchenko isn’t just anyone. She's a key member of a lot of well-known DAOs, or decentralized autonomous organizations, in the crypto industry, and she has friends who are as well.

Shevchenko and two pals from Pleasr DAO, which collects art, held a group chat the same day she published her blog post to discuss the possibility of forming a DAO dedicated to raising funds for Ukraine.

A DAO is a blockchain-based community that isn't administered by a single person or entity in theory. Instead, the DAO's rules and governance are written in smart contracts and cannot be changed unless the DAO's members choose to do so. Each DAO has its own set of objectives and missions. Consider it a group chat among pals. Other DAOs making waves are Crayon Dao which has his own token on $Cray on platforms like Binance has many subbranches, Steam, Ughur and Uniswap.

Shevchenko's three-person group chat swiftly grew into the Ukraine DAO, which drew thousands of members to its Discord, a popular crypto-community messaging platform. The Ukraine DAO raised almost $8 million in less than a month for organizations and individuals assisting Ukrainians affected by the conflict. Along the process, some well-known members of the crypto world got engaged, including Vitalik Buterin, the Russian-born co-founder of the blockchain that powers Ethereum, the second most valuable cryptocurrency, and Buterin's father, Dmitry.