A few days ago Vitalik Buterin, founder of Ethereum, revealed in a post on the decentralized social media site Warpcast that he has not sold ETH for personal profit for five years now.
At most, the creator of the famous smart contract platform, would use part of his ether assets and part of the shitcoins sent to him by different communities, to support non-profit organizations and do charity work.
Hence, he is not selling himself but the counterparts who have to bear some expenses.
In the world of donations Vitalik had made his mark in 2021, when he sold $1 billion in Shiba Inu (SHIB) to the Indian fund “Crypto Relief,” set up by his colleague Sandeep Nailwal to support the Covid-19 emergency.
Summary
Vitalik Buterin has not sold ETH for personal profit for 5 years: the Ethereum community confuses donations as terminations
Two days ago, Vitalik Buterin, a Russian computer programmer and inventor of the Ethereum protocol, posted a very interesting tweet within the decentralized social media site Warpcast, in which he reminded his community that he is not a greedy person for money.
Specifically, he allegedly said that he has not sold ETH for personal profit since as far back as 2018, and that the only transfers from his address involve donations to charities.
https://warpcast.com/vitalik.eth/0xb8ccf84d
Users often confuse donations with terminations, thinking that an ether transfer necessarily implies selling for stablecoin or FIAT with the intent of making cashouts to the personal account of Ethereum’s “boss.”
The media exploit events in which transactions are recorded leaving Vitalik’s wallet to gain attention through “clickbait” headlines, spreading misinformation.
When the founder of the smart contract platform makes a donation in ETH, he is not selling for profit but simply spending the cryptocurrency, while the recipient often decides to sell to cover operational expenses.
According to Vitalik Buterin, and by analyzing the histories of the public addresses in his possession (the connection of which was revealed years ago), there are in fact no traces of recent trading or sales on exchanges that suggest personal gains.
The news does not cause much of a stir and is not surprising to those who by now know the 29-year-old Russian programmer’s personality, since over the years he has never acted for personal gain but always and only for the good of Ethereum.
Suffice it to say that although he came to be a multi-billionaire when Ether’s prices were near all-time highs, he has never sported fancy clothes or driven supercars and, on the contrary, has always behaved modestly and discreetly.
His attire of garish T-shirts with unicorns, rainbows, and ufos is typical of classic computer nerds who do not care about the social influence of money.
Vitalik’s philanthropic activities and historic $1 billion donation to SHIB
Over the years Vitalik Buterin, in addition to ethically supporting Ethereum’s foundation and its affiliated businesses without making substantial personal profits, has often shown that he cares deeply about charity.
In June this year, he revealed that he and the founder of layer-2 solution Polygon Sandeep Nailwal donated $100 million to India’s “Crypto Relief” fund, established in 2021 to support the Covid-19 emergency.
This is yet another handout after the same two developers gave away another $100 million in 2022 with the intent of supporting high social impact activities and projects.
Despite the mind-boggling figures, the donations of the last 2 years have nothing to do with the historic approximately $1 billion transaction in SHIB, with which Vitalik decided to fund the same “Crypto Relief” fund as soon as the second wave of the health emergency in India broke out in April 2021.
The curious thing about this affair, is that the Ethereum founder had not purchased SHIB to fund his philanthropic activities, but had received them for free from the Shiba Inu community as a marketing technique to increase the memecoin‘s countervalue (it was thought that Vitalik would never sell them and hence a “supply shortage” condition would be created).
The Indian fund that received the lucky mountain of money today still has a balance sheet of about $200 million, most of it in USDC.
Vitalik, on the other hand, also directly manages another charity, called Kanro, through a $70 million multi-signature wallet, with which he funds a wide variety of projects with the intention of making his mark on the world and alleviating the suffering of the less fortunate.
On the other hand, as for his personal cryptocurrency wallet (his largest one), whose address was made public by himself in 2018, we know that he currently holds a countervalue of $1.66 million, of which about 35 percent is in ETH while the rest consists of shitcoins that Vitalik has never bought.
In fact, after the SHIB affair, in which the inventor of Ethereum received 50 percent of the coin’s supply for free, several memecoin projects began sending large quantities of tokens to his address.
