The Ukrainian government has confirmed that donors who contributed crypto to finance their military struggle with the invading Russian army will be in line for a token drop.
In the early morning hours of March 2, Kiev wrote that its airdrop was “confirmed”, with a snapshot taken on March 3. March and “Reward (s) to follow.”
Some reacted with surprise after the Ukrainian government published news about its airdrop plans, and thought (perhaps with a pinch of salt) that it looked like an initial Coin Offering (ICO) was underway, although some claimed that they were uncomfortable with the idea of”profiting from the war.”
And while some well-known observers and industry experts felt that the government is more likely to issue non-fungible tokens (NFTs) than fungible coins, others argued, that the plan for the airdrop is not ready yet – but that the comments will decide in the end.
On Twitter, the Ukrainian government wrote:
“The people of Ukraine are grateful for the support and donations of the global crypto community, while we protect our freedom.”
The government has opened the door for crypto to fund its fight against the Russian invasion with Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Tether (USDT) and Polkadot (DOT).” The move was followed by a donation of $ 5.8 Million from the founder of the Polkadot network, Gavin Wood.
In a blog post, Elliptic stated that “several other [crypto] donations of more than USD 1 million” to both the Ukrainian government “and NGOs supporting the military”, amounting to USD through “almost 30,000 cryptoasset donations since the beginning of the Russian invasion.”
- CryptoPunk * NFT also been donated and was now in the Ethereum wallet of the Ukrainian government. Meanwhile, data from SlowMist seemed to show that the combined donations of the Ukrainian government and the NGO in crypto were actually closer to the USD 51 million mark. A number of NGOs and associated charities accept donations in other altcoins.
According to the data compilers, in addition to a single BTC donation worth USD 3 million, another 0.2 Million DOT was contributed. This is in addition to a donation of USD 10 million from the crypto exchange Binance and a donation from FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried.
But not only centralized crypto exchanges and their founders are participating: one of the most popular decentralized exchanges in the crypto world, Uniswap (UNI), announced that it has created an interface that allows crypto users to convert all ERC-20 tokens to ETH and donate them to the Ukrainian government in a single transaction.
The exchange wrote that the addresses shared so far by the Ukrainian government are wallets on a central exchange”which seems to accept only USDT and ETH”, and that it has built its “interface in such a way that anyone who wants to donate, but owns other ERC-20 tokens, can do so with one click.”
Hayden Adams, the Uniswap founder, noted the importance of the move and wrote:
“DeFi tools and incentives are currently being used by a sovereign nation to fund war efforts during an ongoing invasion by a nuclear power.”
The conflict seems to have escalated, the Russian armed Forces claimed on March 2 to have captured the southern port city of Kherson. It is also reported that Airborne soldiers were sent to Kharkiv, according to reports, a large convoy of military vehicles is still stationed outside the capital Kiev.