Vitalik Buterin Cashed Out of ETH During the 2017 Cryptocurrency Bubble

vitalik buterin, ether
Vitalik Buterin cashed out a lot of ether during the crypto craze of 2017, but he's been quite charitable with it. | Source: Steve Jennings/Getty Images

Ethereum mastermind Vitalik Buterin, who holds 350,000 ETH in his main wallet address, allegedly cashed out $40 million worth of ETH between June 2017 and February 2018. The findings came to light by Alex Sunnarborg, a founding partner of the crypto hedge fund Tetra Capital, who dug into Vitalik’s historical account data.

The Breakdown of Vitalik’s ETH Movements

According to Etherscan, Buterin has converted 544,998 ETH to fiat currencies since 2015. This amount equals to almost $49 million, $40 million of which he moved during the period mentioned above.

5/ Vitalik likely cashed out ~ $40,000,000 worth of ETH between June 2017 – February 2018: pic.twitter.com/8RoMKU63ha

— Alex Sunnarborg (@alexsunnarborg) March 19, 2019

While today the balance of Vitalik’s main address is worth $50 million, its net worth reached $500 million when Ethereum exceeded $1,300 in December 2017.

4/ His net worth from this ETH balance alone exceeded $500,000,000 at the...


Ethereum Governance is Currently Underrated says Vitalik Buterin

When it comes to funding development of Ethereum, Buterin stands behind his push to allow wallet developers to charge a 1 gwei fee per transaction made through their software.

In the most recent episode of Into the Ether, Vitalik Buterin appears to discuss all things Ethereum. One of the subjects that came up was the Ethereum governance model. Eric Conner asked Buterin about on-chain governance models, and his thoughts on how Ethereum’s governance stacks up against them.

Current Governance Model Underrated: Vitalik Buterin

Buterin says that the current Ethereum governance model works pretty well, considering the problems it has guided the protocol through.

I actually think that Ethereum governance is under-rated at this point. Because it’s not something that we can attach a cool name to and advertise. And honestly, moderation is a less exciting pitch for people than either on-chain votes, maximum coin holder engagement, or on the other hand immutability. We as a community have never tended to go for extremes. But in reality, on the one hand people complain about governance as a process. But on the other hand, in terms of concrete outcomes that Ethereum governance has achieved, it’s done really well.

It’s implemented the issuance reductions. The issuance reductions seem to be something that most people tend to agree with. […] When there was a crisis back in the year 2016 DOS attacks, it managed to implement, roll, stack out, test and roll out a hard fork all within a time span of 6 days. That’s not something we want to repeat but it’s clearly something we can do if we really wanted to.

When there was a Constantinople bug, it managed to delay the fork within a few hours. It is achieving the things that you might reasonably want a governance of a protocol to achieve, which is to make changes people want and not make changes people want. The one thing that it’s not achieving is dispute resolution or...


Vitalik Buterin “Ethereum will eventually be able to process $1m transactions per second”

Vitalik Buterin

In a recent OmiseGO AMA session, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin announced that soon the Ethereum network would be able to process one million transactions per second, with Sharding and Plasma technology playing a vital role.

This advancement in the scalability issues of blockchain based technologies has been something which Buterin has long discussed. Whilst these decentralized networks have the potential to become a part of the everyday world, they are limited by the capacity of transactions per second.

The Ethereum blockchain at the moment can “processes around 15 transactions per second” Buterin stated in the conversation. Whilst this is far more advanced than the capability of Bitcoin, for example, the capability of Ethereum is far smaller than “PayPal, VISA and the major stock exchanges which go up to about 80,000 transactions per second” according to Buterin.

Whilst Buterin knows too well that the current level of transactions processed by the Ethereum blockchain is high for the platform and industry, he also knows that the scalability of Ethereum has some major issues.

The layer one property improvements that Sharding can address in these scalability issues allows the blockchain to process these transactions a lot...