According to Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, the planned airdrop to reward people for donating cryptocurrencies will not happen after all. Instead, non-fungible tokens (NFTs) will be introduced, although it is currently unclear whether they will be distributed for free or available for purchase. An announcement that has received a rather cold reception from some donors, some going so far as to speak of a “governmental rug jumper”.
Ukraine has finally cancelled its airdrop
After announcing an airdrop to reward people who donated cryptocurrency to support it, Ukraine finally reversed its decision the next day.
The information was directly transmitted by Mykhailo Fedorov, the Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister, from his personal Twitter account. He has been handling most of the communication since the beginning of the conflict with Russia, in parallel to the official Twitter account of Ukraine.
After careful consideration we decided to cancel airdrop. Every day there are more and more people willing to help Ukraine to fight back the aggression. Instead, we will announce NFTs to support Ukrainian Armed Forces soon. We DO NOT HAVE any plans to issue any fungible tokens
– Mykhailo Fedorov (@FedorovMykhailo) March 3, 2022
As stated in the tweet, Ukraine will offer non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in place of airdrop, though it is not clear if this will be a free distribution or if a series of NFTs will be offered for sale to provide a new way to financially support the country.
Indeed, Ukraine is continuously proposing new ways to help with cryptocurrencies, as we have seen in recent days with the support of donations made in Dogecoin (DOGE) or even with Polkadot (DOT).
According to this tweet, the partner that will help Ukraine to mine these new NFTs is yet to be defined. However, we can imagine that an event of this scale will motivate more than one company specialising in the field
An announcement that sparked a flood of donations
As we can see from this graphic, cryptocurrency donations immediately flooded into the government’s Ethereum (ETH) address, with a volume of several thousand transactions per hour after the initial airdrop announcement. In total, the equivalent of $7 million was raised as a result.
Graph of donations made to Ukraine and various support organisations
But following the cancellation of the airdrop, the trend was completely reversed as the volume of donations dropped considerably. The number of donations dropped from several thousand to a few hundred.
Nevertheless, the operation was beneficial for the Ukrainian government, which was able to collect a considerable amount of money.
A large number of Internet users denounced the “first governmental rug pull”, while others replied that the only thing that matters is that money was collected for a good cause.
Ukraine’s communication is thus weakened, but its leaders could nevertheless decide to offer NFTs to those who participated in this collective effort in order to satisfy as many people as possible.
A fake token appeared after the airdrop announcement
Following the initial announcement and in order to capitalise on the hype, people with malicious intent created a token entitled “peaceful world (WORLD)” making it appear to be the reward for those eligible for the airdrop. The announcement of this token was unfortunately shared by some media, giving it some credibility.
However, several clues pointed to a probable scam, notably the fact that the token was distributed several hours before the snapshot that was supposed to determine who would be eligible for the airdrop.
As a result, after the token was placed on the market, it was traded for over $500,000 in volume on the Uniswap platform at the time of writing. Since then, the address has been classified as a possible spam or phishing address on Etherscan following numerous complaints from users.
We can only recommend you to be careful with your cryptocurrency donations, especially by always checking the source of the information. As for Ukraine, we invite you to check the official Twitter account of its government to stay informed
