Vitalik Buterin Offloads Meme Coins for Charity

Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, has conducted several meme coin sales for charity in recent months.

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, recently sold large quantities of 28 different meme coins, generating a total of around 984,000 USDC. These proceeds were then donated to his charity, Kanro.

The sale had a significant impact on the prices of several meme coins, but there was no clear consistency in the price movements. Some meme coins fell by more than 50%, while others rose over 100%.

This isn’t the first time Buterin has sold meme coins for charity. In December, he donated 88 ETH to the Khao Kheow Open Zoo, which is home to Moo Deng. The MOODENG coin rallied massively following this endorsement.

Buterin also offloaded over $2 million in meme coins in October, donating the proceeds to other charities.

This time, all the meme coin money went to one particular charity. Kanro is one of Buterin’s own non-profit organizations dedicated to fighting pandemics.

Buterin has shown increasing interest in making donations and contributing to research on preventing communicable diseases, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic.

For example, back in 2021, the Ethereum founder donated nearly $1 billion to help fight the pandemic in India.

Moreover, Buterin has been constantly advocating for using meme coins as a way to give back to the community beyond speculative trading. Today’s sell-offs reflected this notion.

He sold 80.47 trillion JSHIBA tokens for 21,466 USDC, while 92,000 DOGE tokens were worth 35,233 USDC.

Nearly all of the assets were sold for less than 100,000 USDC, but this could either mean offloading a few thousand or many trillions.

In other words, his act of charity wrought real havoc on some of these smaller assets. For example, DINU fell 68%, while ESTEE rose over 100%.

Some of these meme coins had a small market value and poor pool depth, so Buterin caused a major disruption.

However, this did not amount to a consistent crash, as several assets ended up benefitting. These dramatic swings highlight the volatile character of meme coins, even compared to other cryptoassets.

It seems unlikely that Buterin planned to consciously spike any of them. Indeed, on several occasions last year, a major sell-off and donation from him caused the underlying meme coins to jump. This sale was very recent, so similar benefits may yet happen.