Vitalik Buterin’s Getting $100 Million in Donated Crypto Back: Here’s Why

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin is getting back a portion of Shiba Inu coins that he had donated to an Indian COVID-19 relief fund in 2021 named India Crypto Relief Fund, also known as CryptoRelief. Buterin recently took to Twitter to state that CryptoRelief is sending $100 million (roughly Rs. 745 crore) in cryptocurrency from the “Shiba fund” back. Buterin said that he plans to “personally deploy these fund(s)” in some “higher-risk, higher-reward COVID science and relief projects worldwide”. He went on to say that in pushing for a transparent way of deploying the said funds, he had co-founded a new organisation named Balvi, which will oversee the process of deploying the funds on his behalf.

Balvi, according to Buterin, will primarily focus on deploying the said “SHIB funds” in areas of vaccine research and development, funding innovative air filtration projects, and testing among others.

Meanwhile, Sandeep Nailwal, a co-founder of Polygon and also the founder of CryptoRelief confirmed Vitalik’s statement, saying that they would be releasing the funds in USDC, a stablecoin that is pegged to the US dollar. According to Sandeep, the decision to return some of the funds to Vitalik was largely informed by the need to avoid conflict with Indian laws on the distribution of relief funds.

“Considering fund’s foreign origin and laws of India, CryptoRelief followed a systematic, controlled, and robust approach in disbursing funds mandated to be utilised for India. But being an Indian citizen (NRI), I have to be extra cautious in any of the projects being donated to,” he said.

He further noted that Buterin, being a non-Indian was better suited to making decisions and deploying to projects that have a higher risk but can lead to high rewards, faster.

After minting one quadrillion SHIB tokens in 2020, Ryoshi, a co-founder of the memecoin noted in the ‘WOOF Paper’ that they would be sending 50 percent of the total coins to Vitalik as an appreciation for his contribution to the crypto ecosystem.

Vitalik later donated a whopping 50 trillion SHIB to the India Crypto Relief Fund for the mitigation of COVID-related effects. He then burnt about 90 percent of his remaining holdings (410 trillion SHIB) valued at around $6.7 billion (roughly Rs. 50,045 crore) then, citing the danger of being the locus power of holding that amount of the total circulation of a coin.