March 29, 2024

Vitalik Buterin: Ethereum Foundation earned $ 100 million on 2017 price peaks

The Ethereum Foundation sold 70,000 ETH in December 2017 and January 2018, when the price of the second largest cryptocurrency by capitalizationwas near its maximum values, earning $ 100 million on this. Vitalik Buterin said this during a podcast with Thiel Capital managing director Eric Weinstein, Bitcoinist writes.

According to Buterin, he convinced the Ethereum Foundationto take such a step, thanks to which the organization doubled its financial reserves. Then many members of the community wondered about the true reasons for this decision. One of the assumptions was that the Ethereum Foundation at that time had exhausted all its reserves in fiat, but Buterin denied this version.

In an interview with Weinstein, the founder of Ethereum did notbegan to talk about whether he was selling coins belonging to him personally at that time, earlier Reddit users reported that in December 2017 he sold 30,000 ETH. Presumably, he could have earned about $ 22 million for them.

Recall that in January 2018, ETH reached a pricethe maximum is about $ 1400, but today it costs 10 times cheaper. According to Buterin, he is more likely pleased with this fact, since the cryptocurrency industry has not yet created enough value for its total capitalization to reach trillions of dollars.

At the same time, the founder of Ethereum insists that, having information about sales carried out by the Ethereum Foundation, he did not shorten the cryptocurrency.

Recall soon Ethereum price peaksThe Foundation provided several significant grants to various projects, and continued to do so throughout 2018. Already in 2019, the organization allocated $ 30 million for the development of key projects, including $ 19 million for ETH 2.0.

Earlier in December, it became known that the Ethereum Foundation plans to reduce funding for some of the internal teams, but, as Buterin said, this is not due to a lack of funds.

According to Etherscan, over the past three months, 11,000 ETH (about $ 1.5 million) have been withdrawn from the Ethereum Foundation. Now the balance on the accounts of the organization is just over 597,000 ETH.

At the end of last year, Buterin said that he never possessed more than 0.9% of the supply of the second cryptocurrency in terms of capitalization, and the amount of its assets never approached the $ 1 billion mark.