The world’s youngest known crypto billionaire has donated more than $1 billion in cryptocurrency to India’s COVID-19 recovery.
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, open-sourced blockchain that facilitates ether cryptocurrency, transferred 50 trillion shiba inu coins, a dogecoin spin-off, and 500 ETH on Wednesday to the India Covid-Crypto Relief Fund.
At the time, the shiba inu coins were worth around $1.2 billion $1.14 billion ($A1.5b).
This isn’t the first time the 27-year-old Russian-Canadian programmer has donated to India’s COVID-19 recovery.
In April he transferred about $600,000 ($A776,000) in ether and maker (MKR) coins to the relief fund.
Creator of the fund Sandeep Nailwal immediately took to Twitter to thank Mr Buterin for his donation and assure investors that the funds would be use responsibly.
“We will not do anything which hurts any community specially the retail community involved with SHIB,” he wrote.
Shiba inu coin is a meme token that plays off the dogecoin cryptocurrency, which was originally created as a joke but shot to popularity when tech billionaire Elon Musk showed interest in it.
Founded in 2013, dogecoin’s creators say it was intended as an ironic response to two big internet phenomena: cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin, and a meme image of a Shiba Inu dog.
That gave the unit its unique name.
“From ‘that seems like it’s funny’ to actually doing it took about three hours,” co-founder Billy Markus, a video game-obsessed software engineer at IBM, told the news website CNET.
Users of Reddit forums then began using dogecoin, thanks to its previously extremely low prices, to welcome posters’ comments.
The price of the virtual unit hit a record high over the weekend ahead of Musk’s hosting of popular US sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL).
Dogecoin then tumbled because the Tesla and SpaceX founder joked on the show that dogecoin was a “hustle”.
Musk has also stepped up his attack on bitcoin, sending prices falling following a series of critical tweets yesterday.
Taking to Twitter, the 49-year-old Tesla CEO shared a graph which showed bitcoin’s electricity usage had soared during 2021.
“Energy usage trend over past few months is insane,” he posted.
In a previous tweet, he had revealed Tesla had suspended vehicle purchased using bitcoin.
“We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel,” the statement reads.
“Cryptocurrency is a good idea on many levels and we believe it has a promising future, but this cannot come at great cost to the environment.
“Tesla will not be selling any bitcoin and we intend to use it for transactions as soon as mining transitions to more sustainable energy.”
Musk’s stinging criticism stunned investors, given his vocal support of cryptocurrency, and his comments sent prices plunging, dropping 15 percent at one point to les than $A64,700.
Other cryptos, including ether and dogecoin, also fell and hundreds of billions of dollars was wiped from the total cryptocurrency market.
