Ethereum Creator Vitalik Buterin Burned $7B Shiba Inu

Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, was recently interviewed on the UpOnly podcast. Buterin spoke for nearly two hours with Cobie and Ledger of the FTX-affiliated podcast, in which he explained the difficulty of burning 90 percent of 500 trillion tokens.

Buterin received the SHIB tokens and contributed 10% to the India Covid Crypto Relief Fund, which had a value of $1.2 billion at the time. He destroyed 90% of them (valued around $7 billion) at the time because he didn’t want to be a center of power.

He eventually torched nearly all of his remaining SHIB tokens. Buterin explained that accessing and sending SHIB tokens requires a series of complicated operations.

The money was in the shape of two numbers written on separate pieces of paper in a cold wallet at first.

Buterin explained that he had to add the two numbers together to get the private key. To finalize the transaction, he input the numbers into a $300 PC he bought at Target. Buterin then proceeded to burn the tokens, calling the whole thing ‘frightening’.

Buterin recently conducted a series of Twitter polls in which he asked users what money they would prefer for transactions and savings if Ethereum was no longer the dominant coin in 2035.

Buterin believes Ethereum will play a significant role in his future. According to Vitalik, Ethereum is still aiming for a transaction fee of $0.05, and that rollups and sharding are the best ways to scale without sacrificing security or decentralization. Within a few of years, he expects transaction costs to fall below $0.05. He also stated that the ZK-rollup Ethereum Virtual Machine is progressing well, and that most nodes will not be able to store the entire chain.

On Ethereum, a roll-up is a layer two solution in which transactions are performed outside of the main Ethereum chain and transaction data is reported on layer 1. Sharding is a term adopted from traditional databases that refers to a database’s horizontal scalability, similar to expanding the number of lanes on a motorway to alleviate traffic congestion. Ethereum is currently overcrowded, resulting in exorbitant gas fees.

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