Ethereum inventor, Vitalik Buterin, might have single handily put a halt to the meme coins mania, at least, in the short term. Buterin was the recipient of 50% of the entire supply of Shiba Inu (SHIB), a token that saw a surge in interest after major exchange platforms added it to their products for the spot and derivatives market.
In a donation spree, Vitalik Buterin sent his SHIB tokens, along with ELON, MIRI, and AKITA to several charity foundations. Ethereum core developer Hudson Jameson made a list of the charity project and the amounts they received.
The Gitcoin Community, a Web3 based project with a large number of open-source developers, received all AKITA tokens into their Multi-Sig address. The Methuselah Foundation, a non-profit organization focused on extending the human lifespan, received all ELON tokens and 1,000 ETH.
The MIRI organization, an artificial intelligence project with the objective of developing the mathematical theory of trustworthy reasoning for autonomous AI systems, according to their official website, received 1,050 ETH. The Charter Cities Institute, created to improve human life by “building the ecosystem for charter cities”, received 500 ETH.
Vitalik Buterin Dumps, But For A Good Cause
In April, Vitalik Buterin donated $500,000 in ETH to Polygon’s co-founder, Sandeep Nailwal, an initiative to aid India’s Covid-19 relief campaign, CryptoRelief. Now, he sent the organization 500 ETH and 10% of his SHIB supply which it’s estimated at around $1 billion.
Via their Twitter handle, the organization confirmed the donation of 50,693,552,078,053 SHIB and stated the following:
We plan to do a thoughtful liquidation to ensure we meet our COVID relief goals. We have decided to convert the donation slowly over a period of time.
Nailwal also confirmed via his Twitter account that they plan to be “responsible” with the donations. Therefore, they plan to use the funds without “hurting” the SHIB community. He reassured SHIB holders that they have no reasons to be worried.
In response, SHIB community members claimed that Buterin’s donation could be amongst the largest in history and could attract new users into the Shiba Inu ecosystem. User “SHIB Informer” said the following:
We are not worried at all. The #SHIBArmy is strong. Today Vitalik Buterin did a lot of moves, and a portion of this involved this donation (can this be the biggest in history? Anyone knows?). The best for $SHIB is yet to come.
Buterin’s donations were generally praised by the crypto space. Many agreed that the funds will be better used by the aforementioned organizations and will contribute to the de-congestion of Ethereum’s network.
The tokens donated by Buterin saw massive drops in their price. ELON had a 95% correction. SHIB losses were minor in comparison, and since then the price has been recovering. At the time of writing, SHIB trades at $0,000021 with a 37.4% loss in the daily chart and a 1,258% gain in the 7-day chart.