Ethereum Creator Vitalik Buterin Donates $500,000 from ‘Animal Coins’ to Charity

Vitalik Buterin has yet again put the trillions of crypto tokens that people routinely send to him to good use: this time, to help animals in need. 

On Wednesday, the Ethereum co-founder donated $532,000 worth of ETH to the Effective Altruism Fund’s dedicated Animal Welfare Fund. The crypto, he says, came from selling off all of the “animal coins”—animal-themed, Ethereum-based meme coins—that crypto users sent him over the last year. 

Meme coins routinely invoke animals—dogs, cats, ducks, you name it—as their central theme. And many such tokens have ended up in Buterin’s Ethereum wallet, against his will.

For years, crypto users have sent tokens to the wallets of major industry figures like Buterin, often in tiny increments, but occasionally in massive ones. The unsolicited donations can take on the air of tithes, given Buterin’s revered profile as one of crypto’s founding fathers.

They can also serve as a means to give a project an air of legitimacy, by forcing Buterin to hold a significant chunk of its token supply whether he wants to or not. 

In 2021, the anonymous developers of Shiba Inu, a popular Ethereum meme coin, sent 50% of the token’s entire supply—nearly $7 billion worth of SHIB—to Buterin’s Ethereum wallet. Buterin eventually sent a $1 billion chunk of that sum to aid Covid relief in India, and burned the rest, saying at the time that he didn’t “want to be a locus of power of that kind."

The Ethereum developer is, famously, no fan of degens sending him unsolicited crypto. He reiterated that point this week, maintaining that, while he was happy to donate funds to a good cause, he would “appreciate it if coin holdings just get allocated to the charities directly.”

Buterin also linked to a blog post he wrote in March, imploring the crypto community to start designing meme coins for more beneficial and practical purposes like charity fundraising.

The crypto developer has long been a vocal critic of how meme coins are predominantly used in crypto—as often lewd or grim vehicles for rampant speculation.

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.