With so many prominent figures in the cryptocurrency world, it should come as no surprise that a deep dive into the history of these influencers arises every now and then. Alex Sunnarborg, who is a founding partner of the Tetra Capital crypto hedge fund, decided to dig into the historical account data of Vitalik Buterin. In his findings, he discovered that the Ethereum king, who has 350,000 ETH in his main wallet address now, cashed out $40 million in cryptocurrency, starting in June 2017, and going until February 2018.
Based on data through Etherscan, since 2015, has converted just under 545,000 ETH to fiat currency, which is about $49 million. Of that amount, nearly 80% happened during the period mentioned above.
5/ Vitalik likely cashed out ~ $40,000,000 worth of ETH between June 2017 – February 2018: pic.twitter.com/8RoMKU63ha
— Alex Sunnarborg (@alexsunnarborg) March 19, 2019
Now, Buterin has holdings that add up to $50 million, reaching $500 million for his net worth in cryptocurrency, which happened when Ethereum got to December 2017.
4/ His net worth from this ETH balance alone exceeded $500,000,000 at the peak: pic.twitter.com/nLVRemAmqH
— Alex Sunnarborg (@alexsunnarborg) March 19, 2019
Sunnarborg took the initiative to reach out to Buterin, hoping to confirm the information that he had discovered. However, Buterin instead said that he has never cased out at the $915 level for ETH. Therefore, his fiat currency holdings were under $30 million, showing that he had reached $8 million in donations.
My fiat holdings are well under $30m. You likely overestimated due to (1) all prices generally being on the high side, eg. I definitely never cashed out anywhere close to the $915 level, (2) forgetting charity donations (~$8m I believe)
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) March 19, 2019
Even with the substantial moves that Buterin has made for his personal gain, he has also expressed impressive eagerness in the way of charitable events and causes. He has also donated $763,970 in ETH to a nonprofit organization called Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), which focuses on handling the hazards of artificial intelligence.
In February last year, Buterin contributed $2.4 million in ETH to the SENS Research Foundation (SRF), supporting the development and research for diseases involved with aging. Days later, he contributed 100 ETH to the Pineapple Fund for a digital library, and he contributed $1 million to GiveDirectly the following month to help refugees in East Africa. Also, in 2018, Buterin contributed a collective 3,000 ETH tokens amongst three startups – Prysmatic Labs, Sigma Prime, and ChainSafe Systems – to help with Ethereum 2.0’s development.
Overall, Buterin has continued to keep a transparent disposition about the crypto assets he holds. Even though the grows of the network continues to be his main focus, the movement of ETH tokens in such high numbers could do some damage to the price of ETH. As it stands, at the time of writing, Ethereum is priced at $136.89, which has dropped by 2.49% in the last 24 hours.
