Vitalik Buterin explains the rigorous process of burning $6B worth of SHIB

Last May, developers behind the Shiba Inu meme token sent 50% of the entire coin’s supply to the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin. However, Buterin did not HODl these coins, but instead donated 10% and burned the rest.

The total supply of SHIB when it was launched was at a quadrillion coins. Buterin was gifted half of this supply, which was roughly around 505 trillion coins.

How Buterin burned $6B worth of Shiba Inu

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Buterin explained the complex process through which he burned the Shiba Inu (SHIB/USD) tokens sent to him during an interview at the UpOnly Podcast show. The podcast is hosted by Cobie and Ledger.

Over $6 billion worth of cryptocurrency is not something easy to get rid of, not forgetting the staggering supply of hundreds of trillions of a token. According to Buterin’s narration, burning these tokens was a tedious process.

Buterin noted that to burn these tokens, he had to buy a new laptop from Target that cost him around $300. He noted the tokens were initially placed in a cold wallet whose private key was written on two separate pieces of paper. He had one part of the private key, while the rest of the numbers were with his family in Canada. Hence, he had to call them to get the other numbers.

Once he combined the two numbers, he used his new laptop to access the wallet. He said,

I sent my ETH out by generating a transaction and then on a computer bought from target for about $300 bucks for just this purpose.

Before disabling the internet connection on the laptop, Buterin downloaded a program to generate QR codes. After generating the ETH transaction, he used his phone to scan the QR code, copied it to the laptop and put it in on Etherscan, after which he began burning the tokens.

Buterin did not want the free tokens

Buterin burned these tokens during the same month he received them. However, he only burned 90%, with the remaining 10%, worth around $1.2 billion being sent to the India Covid Crypto relief Fund. In one of the transactions made, Buterin attached a note saying, “I don’t want to be a locus of power of that kind.”