Ukraine has become the first state to organize cryptocurrency airdrop.
After receiving donations close to USD 37 million in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, the Ukrainian government decided to reward those who have supported its cause. To that end, it announced a free token distribution campaign, known in the cryptocurrency industry as an airdrop. An airdrop is an event commonly used by cryptocurrency projects that wish to boost the adoption of their tokens. Under this premise, they give away a certain amount of coins or NFT (non-fungible tokens) to address interacting with their organization. This is a popular marketing strategy to reward early adoption or distribute governance tokens.
According to the information, those who make donations to the official Ukrainian cryptocurrency addresses before Thursday, March 3 at 6:00 pm Kyiv time (UTC/GMT +2 hours) will participate in the release of gift tokens. This follows from the publication on the official Twitter account of the Ukrainian government. The tweet does not provide details on which token or tokens will be distributed during the event, nor whether there are any conditions that donor wallets must meet to receive the reward. However, it does encourage the cryptocurrency community to continue to support with funds for the defense of Ukraine in the context of the war with Russia.
Generally, during an airdrop, the sending of reward tokens starts hours after the snapshot is taken. In this case, the data was not disclosed either. However, the official tweet invites to follow the information related to the donation campaign through the Twitter account of Mikhail Fedorov, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation of Ukraine.
Government Airdrop: another milestone for cryptocurrencies
This will be the first time a country's government organizes an event of this kind, so many have called the event a milestone, both for unconventional fundraising and for cryptocurrency use cases. El Salvador already held an event to send bitcoin to its citizens, but the event had very different characteristics. Venture Coinist founder and host of The Coinist Podcast, Luke Martin, tweeted that "Ukraine will make history tomorrow by being the first nation-state to release a token to those who donated." In his view, this experience opens the door for more countries to repeat it. "Countries are performing airdrops. Wild times," Martin wrote. For her part, lawyer Cris Carrascosa, founder of ATH21, a firm specializing in crypto assets and blockchain, called the Ukraine airdrop "one of the biggest use case milestones" for cryptocurrencies. "Beastly to be able to live it, especially since I think few of us could have even imagined it," the lawyer's tweet reads.
Donations soar to USD 51 million.
As reported by CryptoNews, donations in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in the framework of the humanitarian emergency facing Ukraine had reached the equivalent of USD 37 million last February 26. But the announcement of the airdrop stimulated a new wave of donations worth more than USD 10 million. According to SlowMist data, the total cryptocurrency contributions already stand at USD 50.98 million. The bitcoin (BTC), ether (ETH), Tron (TRON), and Polkadot (DOT) addresses associated with the Ukrainian government, which only on Tuesday contained an overall figure of USD 16.7 million, on Wednesday already total about USD 27.3 million. There has been speculation on social networks as to which token the Ukrainian government will distribute. Some agree that it could be an NFT, although others have drawn attention to the record that participation in the event will leave uncertain future consequences.