If you haven't been following this story, I'll give a brief recap but this is all literally happening as we speak. I'm trying to get this article out as fast as possible so you can watch along. The long story short is that there's a guy named Vitalik Buterin who is the co-creator of the popular cryptocurrency Ethereum. Earlier this week Vitalik was suddenly one of the richest people in the world with a net worth that topped $21 billion. Of that $21 billion, roughly $1.3 billion came from his stash of 333,000 Ethereum after the price of Ether broke $4,000 a few days ago. The rest of Vitalik's $20 billion fortune was made up of dozens of dog-themed alt-coins that he had been unwittingly gifted. The most notable gift was 505 billion Shiba Inu coins, aka SHIB. At one point, Vitalik's SHIB "gift" was worth $19 billion.
For a detailed background of what happened earlier this week, please read this article:
The Creator Of Ethereum Was Unwittingly Gifted Half Of A Dog Meme Cryptocurrency…
Long story short, back in April the creators of SHIB announced they had transferred half all SHIB in circulation to Vitalik. They claimed to be doing this to legitimize the token and protect the circulation. In reality, this was likely more of a publicity stunt. A publicity stunt that temporarily worked very well. I certainly had not heard of SHIB before Sunday, and now it's basically all I've talked about for days.
Perhaps thanks to the artificially low circulation and a lot of hype, as of Sunday night Vitalik's 505 billion SHIB – which were just dumped into his public wallet – were worth $8 billion. Within 24 hours the number had grown to around $19 billion.
Emulating SHIB's success and hoping to ride the publicity wave, dozens of other dog-themed coins transferred huge chunks of their currency into Vitalik's public wallet, which you can check yourself right here. After his Ether holdings, there were literally 40 pages of random coin holdings that had been transferred to Vitalik.
(Photo by John Phillips/Getty Images)
Vitalik Rugs The Dogs
The big risk with this publicity stunt was that nothing was stopping Vitalik from dumping all these gifts onto the open market. In the crypto world this is called "burning" or "rugging", as in "pulling the rug out."
If you're the creator of SHIB, you were either hoping you could sell a bunch of your holdings while the price was high, basically a pump and dump… or you were hoping Vitalik would choose not to sell out of the goodness of his heart or respect for your currency's future. That's not what happened.
Vitalik is on a rugging spree right now as we peak.
I was first made aware of Vitalik's rugging spree by Larry Cermak via his Twitter account @lawmaster:
Vitalik is starting to dump dog tokens. https://t.co/9R4zwQ6bS3 pic.twitter.com/8C6NeYwd3y
— Larry Cermak (@lawmaster) May 12, 2021
If you follow that thread, Larry links to all the transactions where you can see Vitalik absolutely rugging all these dog coins.
For example, an hour ago Vitalik converted around 100 million Akita in to 322 Ether, roughly $1.3 million.
A few minutes go by and he is just dumping and dumping SHIB. He dumped around $55 million worth of SHIB and sent it to a Coinbase account… presumably his own?
He transferred roughly $500 million worth of unsold alt-coins to open source software platform Gitcoin.
As of this writing, SHIB has dropped 30% in value. AKITA is down 40%.
From what I can see, Vitalik actually donated around $60 million worth of alt-coins by converting and giving away Ether. As of this writing his donations have funded the following organizations:
- Charter Cities Institute
- Methuselah Foundation
- The Machine Intelligence Research Institute
- Givewell
and….
$1 Billion Donation
According to this screenshot below, Vitalik transferred $1 billion worth of SHIB to the India Covid-Crypto Relief Fund. To be clear, the coins were worth $1b at the time of transfer. Now the India Covid-Crypto Relief Fund needs to sell the coins for real money. Who knows how much these SHIB will be worth by the time they get converted to real money.
Vitalik's Wealth Drops
In the 30 minutes since I first heard about the sales, Vitalik's net worth has dropped from $20 billion to $10.7 billion. No doubt that number will go even lower as he continues his rugging and charity transferring.
By the end of the day I suspect you will just see 333,000 Ether in Vitalik's wallet, worth around $1.4 billion.
The bigger picture here is Vitalik Buterin just taught all these alt-coins a brutal lesson. Do not use him for publicity. He will rug your ass without flinching.
What a badass.
