Ethereum Founder Explains SHIB Burning Process: It Was Both Creepy and Fun!

In a recent episode of the Up Only podcast, Vitalik Buterin detailed the $6.7 billion Shiba Inu burning process he carried out in May.

How easy is it to get rid of a nearly $7 billion cryptocurrency you don’t want? As Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin explains, this process is probably more difficult than you might think.

During her visit to the UpOnly Podcast yesterday, Buterin discussed a variety of topics, including the time she dumped the $6.7 billion Shiba Inu (SHIB) in May, during a nearly two-hour interview with the show’s hosts, Cobie and Ledger.

Shiba Inu (SHIB) is a Dogecoin-inspired Ethereum-based meme token that rose in value last year. According to data from CoinGecko, SHIB has increased by more than 40,000,000 percent at one point in the past year, making early investors in the cryptocurrency extremely wealthy in a very short period of time.

Burned 90% of SHIB Tokens in His Hands!

Last May, the platform’s anonymous developers gifted Buterin 50 percent of the total SHIB token supply, bringing Buterin’s total holdings to about 505 trillion SHIB, or roughly $8 billion at the time. The developers made this move because they thought sending the tokens to Buterin would effectively burn the tokens (i.e. take them out of circulation), reduce supply, and increase demand.

Later that month, Buterin sent SHIB and tokens from other crypto projects to various charities. The ETH creator sent 50 trillion SHIB, worth around $1.2 billion at the time, to the India Covid Crypto Relief Fund. Buterin later burned about 90 percent of the remaining SHIB tokens. As for why he did this, in a note he added to one of the transactions at that time, “I don’t want to be that kind of powerhouse. It makes more sense to send the coins directly to a helpful charity (although talk to them first)” he explained.

But it seems that Buterin’s method of getting rid of these tokens is probably as interesting as the question of who and why.

“It was the biggest money I ever had”

Buterin explained the lengthy process the program had to go through to access its servers, access SHIB tokens and then send them; this process included purchasing a new laptop to complete the transaction. Buterin, “The whole process was both scary and fun” He commented and continued: “The scariest part was that it was a much larger amount of money than I ever had.”

Saying that the funds were originally 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 these numbers was with me and the other was with my family living in Canada. So I had to call my parents in Canada and ask them to read me their number.”

Buterin said he put the two numbers together and then entered them into a computer he bought from Target. I created a transaction by sending my ETH on a computer that I bought from Target for about $300 just for this purpose.

Buterin said he downloaded a program to generate QR codes before his temporary laptop completely disconnected from the internet. After creating the Ethereum transaction, he scanned the QR code with his phone, copied it to the laptop, and then put it in etherscan.io/push Tx. Finally, Buterin said that he started sending the tokens and ended his speech on the SHIB burning:

“I mean, it was scary, and it involved a procedure that at a certain point would probably have made a good plot for even a James Bond movie, I’m not sure.”

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