Vitalik Urges Meme Coins To Give Directly To Charities Instead To Him

Buterin says projects trying to leverage his name for promotion should give directly to charities instead of giving him an allocation of the supply.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in a tweet yesterday, urged projects looking to leverage his name for credibility to donate coins to charities instead of sending them to him.

“I recommend all the dog coin/word coin people to not issue tokens to *me*,” Buterin wrote. “If you *must* abuse my name, give the supply directly to those orgs and market it as ‘X% of supply donated to Vitalik-endorsed charities’. But better just talk about the causes directly.”

The crypto founder expressed these sentiments in a long thread where he highlighted perceived flaws in the current practice of effective altruism. According to Buterin, the initiative currently needs an understanding of how to allocate social capital effectively. The Ethereum co-founder asserted that a lack of clear communication on certain issues is worse than a wrong allocation of money for people of influence.

The latest statements follow a trend of meme coins trying to gain traction and credibility by sending a percentage of the supply to the Ethereum co-founder. After a period of silence as crypto markets looked trapped in months-long consolidation, this trend kicked off again in October. Notably, anonymous entities rushed to create tokens inspired by words used by Buterin in his tweets.

These tokens, like DIE and THE, brought fresh excitement to an uncharacteristically dull crypto market, printing massive profits quickly for early adopters. Notably, like Shiba Inu before them, these tokens also sent a percentage of the supply to the Ethereum co-founder.

It bears mentioning that aside from being known as the creator of Ethereum, the programmer has also built a reputation as a philanthropist. Last year, Buterin gave away 50 trillion SHIB he received from the Shiba Inu project worth over $1 billion to support covid relief efforts in India. Should THE and DIE survive, it will be unsurprising to see a similar trend with the percentage of the supply sent to Buterin.

Meanwhile, a token inspired by the Ethereum co-founder’s bio, which gives a platform to a short story titled “The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant,” which tries to chronicle the woes of aging, claims to have already put Buterin’s new ethos to practice. The account for the token with the symbol TYRANT said it sent 90k TYRANT to SENS Research Foundation, which is working to develop anti-aging solutions. It is an organization that Buterin has promoted in the past.

Data from DEXTOOLS shows that TYRANT is trading at the $0.0052 price point, putting the donation at around $468.

Notably, Buterin’s statements elicited a response from Binance’s Changpeng Zhao (CZ), who highlighted that it was better to make donations with the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market cap as it avoided hurdles like liquidity and inflated valuations that are common with new tokens.

Agree with the thread until the "issuing a coin part". If you are making a donation, use a top 10 existing coin. Issuing a coin causes all kinds of problems. Is it for your own benefit (coins you hold) or charity? Not to mention the liquidity issues, inflated valuations, etc…

— CZ ? Binance (@cz_binance) November 10, 2022