In a recent social media post, Shiba Inu developer Kaal Dhairya pointedly reminded Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Butein about the significant source of the funding for the CryptoRelief initiative.
Dhairya noted that Buterin had forgotten to mention the billions in SHIB tokens that “played a major role.”
Earlier this week, former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao revealed that he had donated $10 million in BNB to Buterin’s open-source biotech project aimed at improving public health.
Buterin thanked CZ publicly and also expressed appreciation for Polygon Foundation CEO Sandeep Nailwal and the CryptoRelief initiative for their support.
However, some SHIB holders took issue with Buterin’s omission of SHIB.
Ryoshi, the anonymous creator of Shiba Inu, famously sent Buterin 50% of the total SHIB supply (around 500 trillion tokens). They assumed that Buterin would not touch these coins, but he ended up burning 410 trillion SHIB (roughly $6.7 billion at the time) in May 2021. Around $1 billion worth of SHIB tokens were sent to the CryptoRelief fund founded by Nailwal. It remains one of the largest cryptocurrency donations in history that also helped to push SHIB into the limelight.
Some of the donated funds were later returned to Buterin due to regulatory uncertainty in India.
Buterin then went on to establish the Balvi Filantropic Fund in partnership with the Shiba Inu community.
Last March, the Ethereum co-founder stated that SHIB “massively outperformed” his expectations.
It’s the same situation as with cryptorelief: I quickly sent a pile of SHIB, thinking it would surely drop 100x in a few days so I had to act fast, and expecting they would be able to cash out at most like $10-25m. But of course SHIB massively outperformed my expectations…
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 26, 2024
