Some with a more optimistic view of Wood's tweet suggested that perhaps his request was motivated by a desire to avoid capital gains taxes that could be incurred by converting his DOT to ETH before donating it, but another commenter pointed out that 1) Wood almost certainly holds more than $5M in ETH already as a co-founder of the project, and 2) Wood lives in Switzerland, where private individuals are generally exempt from capital gains taxes.
Gavin Wood decides war in Ukraine is a great opportunity to promote his Polkadot project
On February 26, the Ukrainian government tweeted Bitcoin and Ethereum addresses, allowing cryptocurrency donations directly to the government to support their resistance to the ongoing Russian invasion. Gavin Wood, a co-founder of Ethereum who is now primarily involved with the Polkadot cryptocurrency network, apparently thought this could be a great marketing opportunity for Polkadot if the Ukrainian government would list a Polkadot address alongside BTC and ETH. He took to Twitter to offer a generous donation contingent on them doing so: "If you post a DOT address I'll personally contribute $5m". I'm sure the Ukrainian government have nothing more important to do than futz around with making wallets for every millionaire who wants to promote his crypto project.