Regulatory cloud over Vitalik Buterin’s $1 bn crypto donation

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The News: Vitalik Buterin, the 27-year-old cofounder of Ethereum, has donated more than $1 billion worth of Shiba Inu, a meme coin, to India’s Crypto Covid Relief Fund, causing a flutter in the community and raising questions around whether the price of the asset will hold.

He also contributed 500 Ethereum coins to the fund, according to a Techcrunch report. Ethereum was hovering at Rs 3 lakh ($4,075) per coin on May 13, 2021, making the contribution worth about $2 million. Earlier, on April 25, he contributed $600,000 worth of Ethereum and Maker currencies (100 each) to the fund. 

Prices of both these coins have increased since and combined are worth over $860,000 now.