Vitalik puts useless meme coins to use, donates over $1 billion to India covid relief fund and other charities

Etheruem co-founder and the most respected person in the crypto industry, Vitalik Buterin has donated over $1 billion in crypto to the India Covid Relief Fund and a range of other charities.

He made the donation by offloading massive amounts of dog-themed meme tokens, which he was gifted by the creators of Shiba Inu coin (SHIB), Dogelon (ELON), and Akita Inu (AKITA). These cryptocurrencies have taken off following Dogecoin’s staggering rally of the last few months. Though built around similar memes, these copycats have much larger token supplies.

In a single transaction, Vitalik donated 50 trillion SHIB tokens worth $1.2 billion on May 12, 16:37 pm E.T. to the India Covid Relief Fund set up by Indian tech entrepreneur Sandeep Nailwal. Nailwal is best known as the co-founder and COO of Polygon, an ethereum layer-2 protocol for scalability and usability. Earlier in April, Vitalik donated about $600,000 in ether and maker (MKR) tokens to the fund.

According to SHIB creators, 50% of the total supply was locked into Uniswap for sale contract and the keys were thrown away. The remaining 50% was burned to Vitalik with the hope that Vitalik will never rug SHIBA and it will survive.

Vitalik’s moves have significantly impacted the prices of the tokens. According to CoinCarketCap data, Shiba Inu is down 25%, Dogelon Mars is down 70% and Akita Inu is down more than 28% over the past twenty-four hours.

Shiba Inu community (SHIBArmy) got panicked over this move and price dump. Shiba Inu team has to release a press note to calm everyone down as seen in the below tweet.