Buterin Reveals How he Burned Almost $7B Worth of Shiba Inu (SHIB)

Vitalik Buterin reveals some intriguing details on the process he underwent to burn almost $7B worth of SHIB sent to him by SHIB’s founders.

The UpOnly podcast interviewed Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin yesterday. Buterin chatted with Cobie and Ledger of the FTX-affiliated podcast for almost two hours, in which he revealed the complexity of burning 90% of 500 trillion tokens. The SHIB tokens were donated to Buterin who donated 10% to the India Covid Crypto Relief Fund, which amounted to $1.2B at the time. He burned 90% of them (worth approximately $7B) at the time because he didn’t “want to be a locus of power of that kind.”

Shiba Inu is an ETH-based meme token which was up 40 000 000% last year, making holders very rich very quickly. Buterin told the podcast that he had to buy a new laptop from Target to do the burn transaction. The funds he received from the SHIB founders were held in a cold paper wallet. He had to use the two numbers to get the private key. “One of those numbers was with me; the other was with my family in Canada,” said Buterin. He phoned his family in Canada to acquire the other number. He then entered the private key into his new computer. Furthermore, he generated an Ethereum transaction to send ETH to the charity. Buterin then downloaded a program that generated QR codes. Thereafter, he scanned the QR code for the transaction with his mobile, copied it to the laptop, then put it into etherscan.io/pushTx. Then he started sending out the tokens.

Ethereum’s future

Of Ethereum, Buterin said that he sees it as a large part of his future. Vitalik says that Ethereum is still aiming for $0.05 per transaction and that rollups and sharding are the way forward concerning scaling without sacrificing security or decentralization.  He anticipates transaction costs to dip below $0.05 “within a couple of years.” He also said that progress on the ZK-rollup Ethereum Virtual Machine is going well, and that most nodes won’t store a full chain.

Low transaction costs achievable

A roll-up is a layer two solution on Ethereum, where transactions are executed off the main Ethereum chain, while transaction data gets posted on layer 1. The concept of sharding is borrowed from traditional databases and refers to the horizontal scaling of a database, similar to increasing the number of lanes on a highway to reduce congestion. Ethereum is currently highly congested, leading to very high gas fees. Gas powers computation on Ethereum.  

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