Mykhailo Fedorov, the vice prime minister of Ukraine, announced on Thursday that Ukraine was canceling its plans for an airdrop, a project that would have provided its crypto donors free tokens as an incentive for more donations.
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 airdrop had prompted an influx of microdonations, with 95% of donors contributing 0.001 ether or 0.01 ether with the expectation of getting a free token back. Some called the cancellation a rug pull, implying that Ukraine had somehow tricked donors with the promise of a token.
The cancellation followed an apparent attempt to spoof the promised token. An unknown entity minted a Peaceful World token with the symbol WORLD, which some users mistook as the intended Ukrainian airdrop. The official Ukraine crypto donation wallet appeared to hold almost 7 billion WORLD tokens at one point. The WORLD tokens have since been marked by Etherscan as coming from a problem address, indicating possible fraud.
Ukraine would have been the first nation to conduct an airdrop for crypto donors. El Salvador made a similar move last year when it airdropped $30 worth of bitcoin to every adult citizen who downloaded its government bitcoin wallet.