Vitalik Buterin is known for a lot of things. He is the co-founder of Ethereum, a developer, an innovator, and as of recently, the world’s youngest crypto billionaire. But, he did not choose to hide away his funds, but rather to share them with those in need.
In fact, he donated over $1 billion in cryptocurrencies to a number of charities, leading with the India Covid Relief Fund.
DOGE clones receive exposure through donations
Buterin made a donation by offloading massive amounts of DOGE-inspired meme tokens which he was given by the creators of three different projects — Dogelon (ELON), Shiba Inu coin (SHIB), and Akita Inu (AKITA). The three dog-themed cryptos exploded recently as part of the DOGE rally that took place over the last few months.
However, while DOGE technically doesn’t have a cap on the number of cryptos it can mine, it still has a lot smaller token supply than these copycats. For example, Buterin donated 50 trillion SHIB tokens two days ago, May 12th, which are worth $1.2 billion to the India Covid Relief Fund. The fund was created by Sandeep Nailwal, Indian tech entrepreneur and the co-founder and COO of another project, Polygon.
Before that, Buterin donated $600,000 in ETH and MKR to this same fund. As for Nailwal, he immediately thanked Buterin for his SHIB donation, and he assured the SHIB community that the funds will be spent in the most responsible way. He was particularly insistent on pointing out that the fund will not do anything with SHIB coins that might hurt the community.
Finally, Buterin sent another $441 million of AKITA to Gitcoin — an open-source bounties platform, based on the Ethereum network,