Last week, Ethereum’s founder Vitalik Buterin made a 50 trillion Shiba Inu token donation to India’s Crypto COVID-19 Relief Fund, making the price of the Dogecoin parody coin drop significantly.
While others saw the act as a genuine generosity, some thought it was Buterin’s retaliation for the surge in the price of his network’s gas fees caused by numerous donations of similar tokens sent to his public wallet.
Now, Buterin has burned (destroyed) almost all of Shiba Inu tokens in his possession, significantly lowering the supply of one of the newest cryptocurrencies today.
Vitalik Buterin offers explanation
According to Etherscan, 90% of Buterin’s SHIB tokens worth billions of dollars were burned, and the Ethereum founder has offered his explanation for his action.
Buterin simply said holding the remaining coins in his wallet forever was never an option, and “for security reasons alone they would have to be moved to a better wallet eventually and any transaction I make would get interpreted as an action.” He added it was better to do something useful with it right away.
In line with this, more than 400 trillion Shiba Inu coins worth more than $6.5 billion at press time were destroyed, while Buterin said the remaining 10% of the asset would be donated to another charity.
The effect on Shiba Inu token
Holders of the Dogecoin spin-off altcoin will start the week on a green note, as its price climbed around 50%.
At press time, according to CoinGecko, its unit price is at $0.0000163, recording a 1.2% increase for the past hour — a 2.8% climb for the past 24 hours and 4.1% gain over the past week. It is the 22nd largest cryptocurrency, according to market capitalization, having an overall value of more than $8.1 billion.
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