Vitalik Buterin Dumps $700K Worth of Shitcoins
• Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has sold off nearly $700,000 worth of tokens previously airdropped to him for Ether (ETH).
• The sales resulted in huge price drops due to the low liquidity of the tokens.
• It is speculated that this was motivated by the tax implications of receiving airdrops.
Vitalik’s Token Transactions
On March 7th, a wallet belonging to Vitalik Buterin offloaded 500 trillion SHIKOKU (SHIK) for 380.3 ETH ($595,448), nearly 10 billion Cult DAO (CULT) for 58.1 ETH ($91,021), and 50 billion Mops (MOPS) for 1.25 ETH ($1,950). This represented a large portion of the circulating supply for some of the tokens and caused huge price drops as seen on CoinMarketCap data.
Motivation Behind Selling Tokens
The cryptocurrency community was divided on their opinion regarding Vitalik’s decision to sell his tokens given their outsized effect on prices and liquidity. Some speculated that it was motivated by the tax implications of receiving airdrops which are subject to income tax in most countries. However, this was not confirmed by Buterin himself who had yet to comment publicly about his token transactions at press time.
Buterin Hoarding Tokens?
In May 2021 Buterin initiated a similar offload selling tokens such as Shiba Inu (SHIB) and Dogelon Mars (ELON) resulting in price drops of 40% and 90%. This led some people within the cryptocurrency space to accuse him of hoarding an excessive amount of tokens with fellow Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin during pre-mining sale back in 2018 which he denied via tweet at that time.
Conclusion
While there is no confirmation as to why Vitalik decided to sell his shitcoins now, it could be attributed towards him wanting to avoid having them count as income on his taxes or simply liquidating them into cashable assets like Ether (ETH). Either way, it had an enormous effect on their prices and liquidity so it will be interesting to see how they recover from this incident in future weeks or months ahead.