Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum crypto network and the world’s youngest known crypto billionaire will receive back a portion of Shiba Inu crypto coins that he had donated to an Indian COVID-19 relief fund in 2021. In a tweet, Buterin said that CryptoRelief is sending $100 million (Rs 745 crore approx.) in cryptocurrency from the “Shiba fund” back. “I plan to personally deploy these fund(s)” in some “higher-risk, higher-reward COVID science and relief projects worldwide.”
Buterin went on to say that he founded a new organisation (Balvi) to direct these funds, which according to him, is in a better position to deploy the funds on his behalf.
For the uninitiated, Buterin in May donated over $1 billion worth of meme coins to India’s Covid-19 relief fund as well as a number of nonprofit organisations battling the country’s aggressive second wave. A large portion of Buterin’s donation was made using massive amounts of dog-themed ‘meme coins’, which had been gifted to him for free by the creators of the Shiba Inu coin (SHIB), Dogelon (ELON) and Akita Inu (AKITA), Forbes reported. He donated 50 trillion SHIB tokens, worth around $1.2 billion to the India Covid Relief Fund, founded by entrepreneur Sandeep Naliwal.
Nailwal confirmed Vitalik’s statement in a tweet, 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 added.
Apart from this, Buterin also donated about $1.5 billion worth of coins to Indian charities, some of which came in his own cryptocurrency, Ether. According to Forbes, he donated millions of dollars to tech-focussed charities like GiveWell, Methuselah Foundation, as well as Machine Intelligence Research Institute.
