Vitalik Buterin has dismissed reports that he recently sold his crypto holdings and claimed to have not “sold ether for personal gain since 2018.” Buterin suggested to his followers that the reports often mistake his transfer of digital assets to charitable organizations as sales of his digital assets.
Transfers to Charitable Organizations
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain, has dismissed suggestions that he recently liquidated part of his digital asset holdings. In a post on the decentralized social network Warpcast, Buterin told his followers to ignore reports which mistakenly conclude that his donations to charitable organizations are sales of crypto assets.
The remarks by Buterin came just days after media reports claimed that Kanro, a charity affiliated with the Ethereum co-founder, had moved 15.43 million USDC coins to a multi-signature wallet. In fact, as indicated by data, Kanro made two transfers, one to Coinbase (500,000 USDC coins) and one to Gemini (14.93 million).
Last year @CryptoRelief_ led by @sandeepnailwal allocated $100m to Covid research projects I wanted to fund
Sandeep and I discussed and jointly concluded these and other projects are high-impact and need follow through grants. Hence we decided to put $100m more to these projects
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) June 8, 2023
In his June 8, 2023, post on X (formerly Twitter), Buterin, who described Kanro as his “entity,” spoke of his desire to fund Covid research projects. At the time, Buterin revealed that Crypto Relief, a community-run fund, had “put in 90M USDC from the original $SHIB donation.” He then pledged to donate “10M of his own funds.”
‘Clickbait’ Allegations
However, in his Oct. 17 post on Warpcast, the co-founder claimed not to have sold his ETH holdings in the past five years. Buterin said:
“If you see an article saying ‘Vitalik sends XXX ETH to [exchange],’ it’s not actually me selling, it’s almost always me donating to some charity or nonprofit or other project, and the recipient selling because, well, they have to cover expenses. I haven’t ‘sold’ ETH for personal gain since 2018.”
Reacting to Buterin’s post, some Warpcast users agreed with him that most media reports have incorrectly characterized the donations as disposals. Others accused the media of deliberately producing inaccurate reports just so they can generate traffic to their sites. However, one user implied in his post that Buterin had in fact admitted to indirectly selling a portion of his ETH holdings.
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