Vitalik Buterin tells us how he threw $6.7 billion into Shiba Inu

In an episode of the Up Only podcast, Vitalik Buterin shared how he threw nearly $7 billion into Shiba Inu.

Buterin dumps nearly $7 billion in SHIB tokens

How easy is it to get rid of about $7 billion worth of cryptocurrency that you don’t want? It’s probably a lot harder than you think, says Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum.

While visiting the UpOnly Podcast, Buterin discussed many topics over the course of a nearly two-hour interview with hosts Cobie and Ledger. It also covered the $6.7 billion Buterin dumping of SHIB tokens.

Shiba Inu is a Dogecoin-inspired meme token, based on Ethereum. The currency has appreciated significantly in the past year. Sometime last year, Shiba Inu’s stock surged more than 40,000,000%. For this reason, those who invested early in cryptocurrency became very wealthy within a very short period of time.

Developers vs Buterin

Last May, the anonymous developers of Buterin donated 50% of the total stock of SHIB tokens. Thanks to this donation, Buterin has a total population of about 505 trillion Shiba Inu. A total of about $8 billion at the time. The developers did this because they believed that sending the tokens to Buterin would effectively remove the tokens from circulation. This would reduce supply and increase demand.

Later that month, Buterin sent Shiba Inu and other crypto donations he had received to various charities. For example, he sent 50 trillion Shiba Inu tokens, worth $1.2 billion at the time, to the India Covid Crypto Relief Fund. Then Buterin destroyed about 90% of the remaining SHIB tokens. why? “I don’t want to have that kind of power.” Buterin said this in a note attached to one of the transactions at the time.

But how exactly Buterin got rid of those symbols may be as interesting as who and why.

Buterin explained to Cobie and Ledger the complex process he had to go through to access and then send the SHIB tokens, including buying a new laptop to complete the transaction. Buterin said:

It was scary and fun at the same time. The scary part is that this amount is more than I have ever had.

He said the money was initially in a cold wallet in the form of two numbers written on separate pieces of paper. Buterin said he had to combine the two numbers to get the private key.

One of those songs was with me. The other number was with my family in Canada. So I had to call my family in Canada and tell them to read their number to me.

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James Bond procedure

Buterin said he entered the numbers into the computer he had bought from Target. Buterin did this after adding the two numbers together.

I sent my Ethereum by creating a transaction and then to a computer that I bought from Tarjay for about $300 for this purpose alone.

Before completely disconnecting the laptop from the Internet, Buterin said he downloaded a program to generate QR codes. After creating an Ethereum transaction, he scans the QR code with his phone. Then he copied it to his laptop and put it in etherscan.io/push Tx. Finally, Buterin said, he started sending out tokens.

So it was scary and involved action that would probably be a good James Bond movie plot, but probably not.