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Vitalik Buterin burns half of all SHIBA tokens

Photo of: Joseph Stone
by Joseph Stone

Recipient of billions of Shiba Inu tokens, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has chosen to donate them and burn the rest.

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain had not asked for anything. His wallet nevertheless received several billion dollars worth of tokens, clones of Dogecoin. This included Shiba Inu (SHIB), dogelon (ELON), Akita Inu (AKITA), mwDOGE (mwDOGE) and OURSHIB (OSHIB) tokens.

But with the explosion of the Ether price, Buterin didn’t really need such a gift. The latter is now a cryptocurrency billionaire. Last week, Vitalik Butterin began to donate some of these unsolicited tokens.

This was just the beginning. On May 16, nearly half of the entire supply of Shiba Inu tokens was burned. As a reminder, burning tokens means destroying them, which reduces the supply – in principle increasing the price.

In total, Vitalik Buterin has thus deleted on May 16 for 6.7 billion dollars of Shiba Inu. This represented the balance of the tokens still held on his wallet. The young billionaire already decided on May 12 to give away 10%.

A low blow for the holders of these tokens? That’s not Buterin’s opinion. “I’ve been impressed with the way the dog token communities have handled recent donations! Many dog people have shown their generosity and willingness to not focus solely on their own profits,” he writes.

But the co-creator of Ethereum also hopes to discourage further transfers of such tokens to his personal wallet in the future. For Buterin, there is no question of assuming the burden of these crypto, for security reasons in particular.

The blockchain figure does not intend to participate in the speculation around these cryptocurrencies either. Buterin sends a message to the creators of tokens: he does not want to hold such power over the value of these crypto.

Nevertheless, these tokens will have helped fund global causes, starting with India Covid Relief Fund of the founder of Polygon. This money is aimed at helping the fight against Covid in India. And thanks to Buterin, it has an additional $1 billion in crypto.

According to Etherscan’s information, he also donated $431 million from AKITA to Gitcoin. This is a collaborative platform on Ethereum to pay contributors to open source projects.

These donations were not without consequences, however. They triggered a drop of nearly 40% in the value of SHIB, for a capitalization that remained around $ 9 billion. By burning the remaining tokens, Buterin minimizes these sharp fluctuations in the future.