Vitalik Buterin, founder and co-creator of Ethereum, re-gifted dog-themed tokens that were sent to his public address by its creators.
According to blockchain records, the meme coins include Shiba Inu (SHIB), Dogelon (ELON), Akita Inu (AKITA), mwDOGE, and OURSHIB (OSHIB).
Some 50 trillion worth of SHIB tokens having a value of $1.2 billion at press time was donated by Buterin to the India COVID Relief Fund that was started by Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal just last April. He also sent $431 million of AKITA tokens to Gitcoin – a public Ethereum-based fundraising platform.
A form of retaliation
For some time now, it has been public knowledge that meme coin creators send huge amounts of their tokens to the founders of Ethereum.
At one point, Vitalik received trillions of Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens that were worth $8 billion. While it sounded like a generous gesture, it was part of what is now dubbed as “meme coin mania” that caused spikes in Ethereum gas fees. Some believed that the re-gifting of tokens was a form of retaliation for this.
Besides, with Vitalik having a multi-billion net worth, he can more than afford to generously give to others the tokens that were sent to him through his public wallet without his permission.
DOGE knockoffs go down
Following this development, the so-called Dogecoin imitations experienced severe price drops.
Shiba Inu (SHIB) is down by almost 38% for the past 24 hours, although it still has a market cap of $9 billion. Akita Inu (AKITA) is down by 31.6% and Dogelon (ELON) has a 62.5% dip.
Meanwhile, Polygon’s Sandeep took to Twitter to express his gratitude for the gesture of the ETH founder. In his post, he also assured Shiba Inu token holders that there is no need to worry as they won’t do anything that will hurt the Dogecoin imitations.
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