Vitalik Buterin burns $6.7B of Shiba to reward generous HODLERS

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has burned nearly half of the supply of the trendy meme coin Shiba Inu (SHIB).

Vitalik Buterin burns $6.7B of Shiba to reward generous HODLERS

In a statement embedded into the transaction on May 16, Vitalik explained why he decided to burn $6.7 billion worth of SHIB tokens, emphasizing the “generosity” of the “dog token communities.”

“I’ve actually been impressed by how the dog token communities have treated the recent donations! Plenty of dog people have shown their generosity and their willingness to not just focus on their own profits but also be interested in making the world as a whole better. I support all who are earnestly doing that.”

The recent bull run of SHIB, claiming to be “Doge killer,” came to a brutal end on May 12 as Buterin liquidated trillions of the tokens he was gifted by Shiba’s creators and donated the proceeds to charity.

Buterin said he decided to burn the remaining 90% of Shiba tokens in his wallet and allocate the remaining 10% to charitable causes. He noted that charities with similar values as CryptoRelief, an Indian organization focused on supporting Covid relief through crypto-asset donations, would be considered as potential recipients. He emphasized that simply holding the coins entrusted to him was not an option for security reasons, adding that he wanted to avoid the frenzied speculation that could arise from him making transactions using the dog tokens in the future.

He also said to all the people in the community not to donate any more tokens to him as he did not want to be a “locus of power of that kind.”

The Shiba Inu token prices went on trending on every chart when it was getting listed on Binance last week amid the surging popularity of Dogecoin and other dog tokens. 

At the time of writing, SHIB is down over 46% in 24 hours amid the latest crypto crash triggered by the anti-Bitcoin sentiment expressed by the Twitter account of Elon Musk.

Bitcoin has retreated 8% over the past 24 hours to $44,900 as of this writing.