Vitalik Buterin is getting $100 million back from Crypto Relief!

Last Spring, in an unprecedented move, Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, sent part of his Shiba Inu tokens with a value approximately of 1 billion. USD to the Crypto Relief Foundation that was helping in fighting COVID in India.

How did those Shiba Inu tokens end up with Vitalik? Well, the people behind Shiba had send half of the tokens to his public wallet in what was a smart public PR stunt in order to "burn them" as they claimed. This put Vitalik on the spot as any action he would take would have been considered as using or endorsing Shiba Inu.

What transpired afterwards was that Vitalik sent approximately 1 billion worth of the token to Crypto Relief a charity established by Sandeep Naiwal, one of the co-founders of Polygon (MATIC). The rest (approximately 40% of total supply of Shiba Inu or nearly 410 billion SHIB tokens) were burned by sending them into a dead address while a small portion he announced that would be also used for charity.

Now, Crypto Relief is sending back 100 million USD from that donation to Vitalik, which he plans to use for R&D in vaccines, air filtering and ventilation, testing and etc, through a new organization that he established called Balvi.

One of the reasons that these funds where returned to Vitalik is that Naiwal is an Indian and there are stringent rules and regulations for him about how he disburses, uses, manages, or donates funds. This makes his work and that of Crypto Relief a lot more challenging and demanding in terms of robust compliance.

Now Vitalik can use these funds in an expedited manner in order to support high risk and high reward initiatives that will improve the lives of people fighting with the pandemic and other challenges they face in India and probably elsewhere.

Instead of reading how x and y authoritarian leader or corporation plans to use or adopt Crypto, it is always a refreshing note when hearing that Crypto money funding projects from visionary individuals who seek the betterment of humanity.