Vitalik Buterin Clears Out Memecoin, Donates to Charity

Vitalik Buterin has just liquidated a bunch of memecoins and donated over $500,000 to an animal charity.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has used the proceeds from selling memecoins to fund an animal charity.

Charity donation done, covering all animal coins from the past year or so!
That said, I appreciate it if coin holdings just get allocated to the charities directly😊

It's 2024, we can start doing more sophisticated public goods fun-ding, eg. see https://t.co/8ZVhwkVwLy pic.twitter.com/RQ1ThdLCYL— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) August 15, 2024
On August 14, Vitalik transferred $532,000 to the Effective Altruism Fund’s Animal Welfare Fund. The money came from the liquidation of the “memecoin stash” that the crypto community had been sending him over the years.

Today’s memecoin sale announcement is Vitalik’s response to Neiro’s “blatant PR.” Earlier this month, Vitalik decided to convert 4% of the total NEIRO memecoin supply into 44.4 ETH.In recent years, projects have often proactively sent tokens to the wallets of important industry figures like Buterin, usually in small amounts, but sometimes in large amounts. These are not simply gifts, but also help to increase the project’s reputation thanks to Buterin’s reputation. For that reason, Vitalik does not want to turn himself into a promotional tool for projects, although he does not exclude memecoin.

In a blog post in March, Buterin asserted that “memecoin has more benefits than people think”. According to him, instead of focusing on inflating the value of the coin, it should be associated with more practical purposes such as charity fundraising. Vitalik also criticized the celebrity-backed memecoin trend, but still praised Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis’ Stoner Cats project, for using NFTs to fund a reality show.

This is not the first time Vitalik has liquidated memecoin. The March liquidation raised $700,000. The most notable was the “dog sale” of 50% of the total supply of SHIB in May 2021, raising $1.2 billion. The Ethereum creator has since donated more than $1.7 billion to global charities, including the Covid Relief Fund in India.