Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin donates $1.2 billion of Doge doppelgangers to India’s Covid effort
Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin has been applauded for a charitable act that put a leash on dog meme coins and handed $1.2 billion to India’s Covid-19 relief fund.
The 27-year-old programmer transferred a vast wealth of new Dogecoin copycat tokens which had been gifted into his Etherscan public wallet – a combined worth of more than a billion dollars – to the India Covid Relief Fund.
Developers behind the curiously popular slew of dog-related meme tokens have been pumping their coins at the Russian-born Canadian crypto giant at an astonishing rate. Shiba Inu, Dogelon, Akita Inu, OURSHIB and mwDOGE have all poured into the public wallet in the hope of catching the Ethereum co-founder’s attention.
However, in a show of borderline disdain for the Doge wannabes, the University of Waterloo dropout has handed the assets over to a relief project established by Polygon chief Sandeep Nailwal who created the fund last month in response to the coronavirus crisis in India.
Buterin personally gifted $600,000 to help kick off the fund – a figure that now seems like small change in comparison to the massive donation he transferred this evening.
The move is also a response to the mayhem caused to Ethereum’s gas fees which have spiked due to the sudden stampede for the meme coins.
The surge is driven by investors desperate to cash in on what they hope could be a repeat of the outrageous success of Dogecoin which sent profits rocketing, thanks to several pushes on Twitter and even TV by South African entrepreneur Elon Musk.
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Buterin’s admirable efforts have certainly slapped down the value of the coins – SHIB fell by almost 40 per cent in the last few hours, despite enjoying some seven billion dollars in volume during the previous 24 hours.
Looking beyond the remarkably generous act, Crypto observers will no doubt note that India’s government had recently been making noises about making cryptocurrency illegal. A billion dollar donation towards the country’s desperate fight against a virus that has brought it to its knees may yet dampen the enthusiasm to eliminate a financial process that could be one of its saviours.