- Ukraine has cancelled the planned airdrop and will instead release NFTs to support the country's armed forces
- Earlier today, spoofing spams appeared to show Ukraine had initiated the now-cancelled airdrop
Amidst the ongoing invasion of Ukraine, people from various ends of the world have set up initiatives to support Ukraine and the citizens caught in this humanitarian crisis. Notably, a sizeable chunk of the donations have been completed in cryptocurrencies.
The Ukrainian government had planned to airdrop a token to donators, but these arrangements have been squashed. Just hours ago, Ukraine's vice prime minister and minister of digital transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, announced that "after careful consideration," the government has scrapped the plans and indicated that the country no longer intends to airdrop any fungible tokens.
The minister said that Ukraine would instead mint NFTs to support the country's military.
"After careful consideration we decided to cancel the 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," Fedorov posted on his Twitter account.
The now-cancelled airdrop had been announced yesterday, with a post-drop snapshot slated to take place today at 06:00 PM UTC/GMT +2 hours. Following the announcement, Ukraine's addresses saw a massive spike in donations as a myriad of users attempted to 'trick' the airdrop, with millions of microdonations as little as 0.0001 ETH.
The donation wallets received up to $7 million within a few hours of this upsurge.
Now, here's something interesting
Earlier today, it appeared that Ukraine had kicked off the airdrop, only for blockchain analysts to later rule out the apparent drop as a spoof.
According to data indicated by blockchain explorer Etherscan, it had seemed that Ukraine's official donation wallet held 7 billion Peaceful World (WORLD) tokens ready to be distributed. However, it did not take long before specialists dismissed the transactions around the 'airdrop' as spam controlled by a third party (a well-known fraudulent address) and not Ukraine.
Since the Ukrainian government first revealed that it had started accepting crypto donations in Ether and Bitcoin on February 26, it has collected millions in various crypto donations. As it started taking other crypto coins, Polkadot founder Gavin Wood most recently came good on his pledge to give $5 million in DOT.
At the time of writing, Ukraine's donation addresses have received over $10 million in BTC and $18 million worth of ETH.