Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has just donated over a billion dollars to India’s COVID-Crypto Relief Fund to help the country fight the pandemic. He did this in 500 ether tokens and over 50 trillion Shiba Inu tokens. Vitalik has donated over $600K to the same fund for the same cause. This sudden aid from him plunged the prices of those coins since he had to burn them all to do so.
Vitalik Donates Over $1 Billion Cryptos to India
As it’s clearly evident that India is one of the worst-hit countries in the COVID-19’s second wave, many have come forward to assist with whatever they had. While some made donations to state and central government funds, some made it in cryptocurrencies. One such fund is the COVID-Crypto Relief Fund, started by Sandeep Narwal, founder of Polygon.
Several crypto enthusiasts soon noticed his fund, as many have made contributions to it. One prominent personality among them is Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum blockchain. A couple of weeks ago, Buterin donated over $600,000 in Maker and Ether coins to COVID-Crypto Relief Fund. And now, he made it again, but on a huge scale.
????Vitalik donates 1B Worth Shiba INU To India Covid Relief Fund !@VitalikButerin @sandeepnailwal $SHIB pic.twitter.com/liFcc5DWd4
— Altcoin Alerts (@Altcoin_Alerts) May 12, 2021
According to reports, Buterin sold a chunk of his dog-themed meme coins (Shiba Inu, Akita Inu, and Dogelon Mars) and converted most of them to Ether via Uniswap to aid charities all over the world. The selling spree includes 140 billion AKITA, 660 billion SHIB, and 43 billion ELON tokens, plus the removal of 13,291 wrapped ETH from Uniswap liquidity.
This amounted to a total of 15,719 ETH ($63 million). Now, he donated them along with some of his dog-themed meme coins to;
- Givewell – 13,292 ETH
- Methuselah Foundation – 1,000 ETH and 430 billion ELON tokens ($215,000)
- Machine Intelligence Research Institute – 1,050 ETH
- COVID-Crypto Relief Fund (India) – 500 ETH plus 10% of his SHIB tokens (50.6 trillion tokens)
- Gitcoin’s community multisig – 49 trillion AKITA, and
- Charter Cities – 500 ETH
While his donation cause was genuine, it adversely impacted the concerning coins. At the time of writing, Dogelon Mars was down by 73%, Shiba Inu is down by 30%, and Akita Inu is down by 50%.