Ukraine cancels much-awaited Airdrop to its crypto donors and plans to instead issue NFTs
In an interesting twist after claims that Ukraine’s planned Airdrop was likely targeted by a phishing attempt, Ukraine has decided to cancel its much-awaited Airdrop to its crypto donors.
Ukraine has instead opted to offer NFTs and said that it shall issue NFTs to the crypto donors at an unspecified time.
NFTs to thank the crypto donors
Ukraine had planned to distribute newly minted cryptocurrency tokens by the government before Vice Prime Minister Mykhailo Fedorov announced the cancellation of the planned Airdrop through a tweet.
After careful consideration we decided to cancel airdrop. Every day there are more and more people willing to help Ukraine to fight back the agression. 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
The cancellation came shortly after Twitter users quickly called out the newly minted token Peaceful World (WORD) token distribution from Ukraine’s Ethereum wallet as a likely phishing attempt. The country’s Ethereum wallet had appeared to distribute a newly minted token but it is suspected that hackers were trying to spoof the token in a possible scam.
Umm is this for real? The transactions are just spoofing the Ukraine wallet for the airdrop. https://t.co/YL2tArYtl6 created the contract and https://t.co/A53HcNaOfi added liquidity and is sending out the airdrop. This is how you get your readers scammed @CoinDesk https://t.co/Tkin3usjrW
— razor (@razoreth) March 3, 2022
Airdrop news had led to increased donations
After Ukraine announced the airdrop on Wednesday, the crypto donations had just crossed $50 million.
Just as crypto projects use token airdrops to increase engagement on their platforms, Ukraine had intended to offer an Airdrop to possibly encourage more people to send in their crypto donations and it surely did work. The Airdrop news came was right on the heels of Ukraine saying that it had started accepting DOT donations and starting to accept several other altcoins including dogecoin (DOGE).
At the time of writing, data from Etherscan that the Ukrainian Ethereum wallet has received crypto assets worth over $15.9 million, with Ethereum (ETH) only accounting for about $8.1 million. The rest, which is over $7 million is in form of stablecoins and altcoins like Candle (CNDL), Tether, Dai, USD Coin, and Dogs Of Elon (DOE), among others.
Before it was invaded by Russia, Ukraine had been at the forefront of crypto adoption and it was the first country in the world to officially plead for donation through crypto. The move was in all ways smart since the hryvnia has since crashed and electronic payments were negatively impacted by the invasion.
