Vitalik Buterin, the CEO and founder of Ethereum, has sent $1 billion worth of Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens to India’s crypto COVID relief fund due to the rising number of COVID cases in the country. The fund is an initiative that seeks to help people suffering from the COVID-19 outbreak that India is experiencing right now.
It has been reported that Buterin also sold Akita (AKITA) and Dogelon (ELON), other similar currencies, causing a slide in market prices.
However, these dogecoin ERC20 tokens were given to him to “burn” them, under the assumption he wouldn’t touch them or sell them. Against all popular belief, Buterin decided to put these funds to good use.
Even @VitalikButerin can't escape the monsters of the dark forest Twitter wasn't the only party watching Vitalik's wallet. As always bots were ready to extract what value they could from his pending transactions. Brief recap of those bots and what Vitalik did — Robert Miller (@bertcmiller) May 12, 2021
The report said that the transaction of Shiba Inu tokens worth more than a billion dollars today to the aforementioned COVID Fund, which was founded by Sandeep Nailwal, co-founder of Polygon, a second layer protocol for Ethereum. This is not the first donation Buterin makes to this particular fund. Five days ago, Buterin also donated three million dollars in Dogecoin (DOGE) to this same charity.
(Transparency Update) We thank @VitalikButerin for his donation of 50,693,552,078,053 SHIBA to @CryptoRelief_ . 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. (1/x) — India's Crypto Covid Relief Fund 🇮🇳 (@CryptoRelief_) May 12, 2021
This is one of the biggest donations made by any cryptocurrency personality to help people affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, overlooking the donations of Justin Sun and Balaji Srinivasan, who also contributed to the cause.
Likewise, Buterin also proceeded to dump other meme coins to donate more money to other charities.
According to his transactions record on Etherscan, he donated almost 14,000 Ether to Givewell, a non-profit institution that rates charities and distributes donations based on their rank. He also gave important contributions to Gitcoin, an organization that funds open-source software projects, and to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
Thus, after Buterin sold most of these currencies and made the donations, his personal wallet address was flooded with incoming transactions of other meme coins.
Source: Bitcoin News