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Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin made $4 million in Dogecoin

Photo of: Joseph Stone
by Joseph Stone

Co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin invested $25,000 in Dogecoin in 2016. His tokens are now worth millions.

Vitalik Buterin isn’t just a genius developer. As the co-creator of Ethereum, his Ether holdings are now worth a fortune. In early May, his tokens even made him a cryptocurrency billionaire.

But the co-founder of Ethereum is also an investor in his spare time. In the Lex Fridman Podcast, Vitalik Buterin thus declares that he has held Dogecoin (DOGE) since 2016. At that time, he was investing $25,000 in this crypto.

However, this investment was not guided by the prospect of making a nice capital gain. It was primarily the spirit of the Dogecoin community that led him to spend such an amount. However, he has no reason to regret it.

“(…) the only interesting thing about this coin is the logo of a dog somewhere. But of course, it was one of the best investments I ever made,” Buterin testifies. In 2016, the price of DOGE was nowhere near its current level.

Elon Musk was not yet interested in Dogecoin. In 2020, he got hold of the token and exploded its value through multiple posts on Twitter. The DOGE phenomenon then took on another level of momentum, and its price soared.

“At the end of 2020, Elon Musk started talking about Dogecoin, and the market cap just shot up to $50 billion […] It went up several times,” recalls the Ethereum blockchain mastermind.

Vitalik Buterin remembers his astonishment when in the space of a day DOGE jumped by 775%. Its price climbed from $0.008 to $0.07 in just 24 hours. His $25,000 investment was worth a fortune.

But the developer is not a trader like the others, nor a speculator. However, he quickly resold 50% of his tokens at that price, he explains. His tokens brought him a whopping 4.3 million dollars.

All the proceeds from the sale were then donated to a charity, GiveDirectly. Soon after, the value of the DOGE dropped to $0.04. But later it will reach $0.50. Buterin still holds 50% of his original Dogecoin, the equivalent of $20 million.

“For DOGE to become such a phenomenon, where a lot of people know about DOGE but haven’t heard of Ethereum, that’s something even I didn’t anticipate,” Buterin admits.