After donating to the Indian Covid-19 Relief Fund CryptoRelief, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin is receiving a sizeable portion of his donation back, which is about $100 million worth of Shiba Inu coins.
The 27-year-old Russian developer aims to use these funds to power radical new projects to fight Covid and assist relief efforts. He shared his goal in a recent tweet:
CryptoRelief sending $100m of the $SHIBA funds back to me. I plan to personally deploy these funds with the help of science advisors to complement CryptoRelief’s existing excellent work with some higher-risk higher-reward covid science and relief projects worldwide. https://t.co/xvHxzwwdn8
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 28, 2022
In order to process and deploy this crypto-fund, Buterin has co-founded ‘Balvi’—a new organization that will focus on ‘high risk, high reward’ projects across the world. Some of the ideas he’s looking to support involve ’vaccine R&D, innovative approaches to air filtration and ventilation, and testing.’
I’ve cofounded a new org (Balvi) to direct these funds, which is in a better position to make these bets which will are very-high-value and global in nature and bring great benefit to Indians and non-Indians. You can follow funds at this address:https://t.co/mvmSSGPLmI
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 28, 2022
Why Did CryptoRelief Give Buterin The Funds?
It’s interesting that CryptoRelief made headlines regarding Buterin’s contributions just days before India’s much-awaited 2022 budget which will release today and is likely to contain major policy changes regarding cryptocurrency. While this is likely to affect any crypto-spearheaded efforts for relief programs in India, it’s also compounded by a slew of regulations that zone in on relief funds.
“Considering fund’s foreign origin and laws of India,” said CryptoRelief and Polygon founder Sandeep Nailwal, “CryptoRelief followed a systematic, controlled, and robust approach in disbursing funds mandated to be utilised for India. But being an Indian citizen (NRI), I have to be extra cautious in any of the projects being donated to.”
After confirming Buterin’s words and explaining that the funds would be released in the dollar-pegged USDC, Sandeep also highlighted potential roadblocks in India’s legal framework. He also noted that Buterin’s non-Indian status allowed him to speed up the process, and make faster spending decisions:
Vitalik being a non-Indian can do it in a more accelerated way by being able to do faster decision making and deploying to projects which have higher risk but high rewards too.
— Sandeep | Polygon (@sandeepnailwal) January 28, 2022
In total, the Russian developer contributed a massive 50 trillion SHIB to the fund, before burning the rest of his SHIB holdings. With a total valuation of $6.7 billion, Buterin decided to simply get rid of his 410 trillion SHIB, claiming that he did so to avoid affecting the coin’s market price due to overcentralization.
