Vitalik Buterin Reveals How He Burned Over $7 billion in Shiba Inu

Vitalik Buterin, the Ethereum blockchain’s co-founder, recently revealed how he burned $6.7 billion in Shiba Inu.
Buterin stated in a recent interview with the UpOnly Podcast that unknown devs donated him 505 trillion SHIB tokens in May 2021, which were worth $8 billion at the time.

The developers did this, according to Buterin, because they assumed delivering the tokens to him would essentially burn them, reducing supply and rising demand. Buterin donated SHIB and other crypto donations to different organizations throughout that month, including 50 trillion SHIB ($1.2 billion at the time) to the India Covid Crypto Relief Fund.

Vitalik narrates the hazzles he went through

He mentioned in the podcast that it was scary and fun at the same time. He said the frightening part was that it was more money than he ever had. He added that he had to follow a complicated technical procedure to get rid of it because initially, the funds were all in a cold wallet.

He had paper backups in the form of two separate numbers, where if you add the two numbers, you will get the private key. One of the two papers was with his family in Canada, where he had to call them up and ask them to read it out to him.

He input the numbers into a $300 PC he bought at Target to finalize the transaction. He also created an Ethereum transaction to transmit ETH from the wallet. He then downloaded a QR code generator application and scanned the transaction’s QR code with his phone, copied it to his PC, and pasted it into etherscan.io. He then began the process of burning the tokens.

Vitalik expresses his views on the future of Ethereum

In addition, Vitalik stated that Ethereum is still aiming for a transaction fee of $0.05 and that rollups and sharding are the best ways to scale without losing security or decentralization. “Within a few years,” he expects transaction costs to fall below $0.05. He also mentioned that the ZK-rollup Ethereum Virtual Machine is progressing nicely and that within a couple of years, Ethereum fees will be back under 5 cents.

On the podcast, they also conversed about Vitalik’s life outside crypto, his family, and his future plans outside of Ethereum.