Vitalik's India Donation
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A story about how Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin handled receiving billions in unsolicited cryptocurrency tokens.
"Vitalik Buterin, who's the co-creator of Ethereum, is worth probably $1.6 billion based on the value of Ethereum today. Projects would try to get marketing hype by sending their tokens to Vitalik's public wallet and saying 'Look, Vitalik holds our coin, so you should too.' He didn't actually invest in these - they just sent it for free.
One coin, Shiba Inu, sent about $6 billion worth of their coin to Vitalik's wallet to essentially lock it up. What Vitalik did was pretty awesome - India was going through a really tough patch in COVID, so he donated $1 billion of it immediately to India. Then he dumped the other $5 billion and burned it (eliminated it from the pool) so it wouldn't crash the price if sold on the open market. He kept none of it for himself and helped a lot of people in India out. He did this overnight as soon as he got it."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.