![Vitalik Buterin Donates B Worth of Shiba Inu Tokens to India’s Crypto Covid Relief Fund Vitalik Buterin Donates B Worth of Shiba Inu Tokens to India’s Crypto Covid Relief Fund](https://news.bitcoin.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/shutterstock_1658376769-768x432.jpg)
There's a new dog in town, and it's wasting no time in marking its territory.
Shiba Inu (SHIB) was listed on three different cryptocurrency exchanges in the past 48 hours, after an explosive 966% surge in the same time frame sent the token to 18th in the market cap rankings.
Self-described as the “Dogecoin Killer”, Shiba’s instant addition to Binance on May 10 surprised onlookers, many of whom expected a more in-depth listing process by the world’s largest crypto exchange.
What’s more, the fact that 50% of the SHIB token supply is in the hands of one individual made Binance’s decision to list the token immediately all the more surprising.
The Shiba team purposely sent 50% of the 1 quadrillion token supply to Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin as a means to put the tokens out of circulation. The other 50% was apparently sent to the Uniswap app to provide liquidity. In doing so, the creators claim to have created a decentralized token, the fate of which will be decided solely by the market.
Binance founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao spoke out on the issue of Shiba Inu on Monday, telling his Twitter audience that the exchange was simply following user demand. Zhao said demand to trade SHIB was so high that Binance ran out of deposit addresses for the Ethereum based token:
“Some have voiced concerns about $SHIB listing. We follow users. There is a large number of users demanding it, to the point where we ran out of ETH deposit addresses due to SHIB today. Never happened before for any other ERC20 coin.”
“Not endorsing it. Super high risk. NFA,” he added.
Shiba Inu’s recent emergence came fresh on the back of the rise of Dogecoin (DOGE). Like Dogecoin, Shiba Inu is emblazoned with a variation of the Shiba Inu dog meme. Also like Dogecoin, Shiba awakened from months of inactivity to surge to what was an all-time high on April 20 (i.e. 4/20 day), the same day Dogecoin reached a then all-time high of $0.420.
But what is there to Shiba Inu except for funny dogs and crazy percentage gains? Well, the project’s “woofpaper” alludes to the creation of ShibaSwap, a decentralized exchange where SHIB holders will be able to swap tokens and take part in yield farming. The exchange is currently undergoing “security tests, audits and final updates,” according to the project’s website.
In addition to SHIB, the project also encompasses a multi-token system consisting of BONE and LEASH. All three are expected to be used as part of Shiba Inu’s yield farming feature.
In addition to Binance and FTX, the OKEx exchange also fell in line and listed Shiba Inu according to Tuesday’s press release.
OKEx CEO Jay Hao used the term “experimental” to describe the motivations behind the token listing, and declared a willingness to list “memetic” tokens.
“We are pleased to welcome Shiba Inu to the OKEx platform. I appreciate their experimental spirit, which is exactly what the blockchain and crypto space needs. As an exchange, we are delighted to be able to offer a diverse portfolio of cryptocurrencies, including memetic tokens," said Hao.
CoinGecko, a cryptocurrency data aggregator with close to 100 million views per month, still hasn’t given Shiba Inu a proper listing. By all accounts, this is because it has thus far failed to determine accurate circulation numbers for the token.
We asked Binance how the presence of 500 trillion SHIB (worth over $15 billion) in Vitalik Buterin’s personal wallet affected their calculations of the token’s circulating supply. They refused to comment on matters relating to Shiba Inu.
The DOGE imitator gained nearly 1,000% in the past 48 hours as Binance announces it’s making room for SHIB despite Vitalik Buterin owing 50% of the supply.
Having emerged with the self-applied moniker of “Dogecoin Killer,” the latest cryptocurrency to succeed on laughs alone is making its way to Binance.
Shiba Inu (SHIB) burst into CoinMarketCap’s top 20 rankings just two days ago, likely a response by traders to the hype surrounding Dogecoin (DOGE). Within 48 hours, the SHIB token went from a valuation of $0.000003 to $0.000032 — a 966% increase, which added to over 2,300,000% growth since the start of the year.
When Binance announced it would list SHIB in its innovation zone (a high-risk trading feature) on Monday morning, the token’s valuation more than doubled in the space of two hours, climbing from $0.000013 to $0.000032.
The Shiba Inu website claims 50% of the SHIB token supply has been irretrievably locked into Uniswap to provide liquidity. The other 50% has been sent to Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin as a “burn” gesture, however, Buterin still has full access to the funds.
The 500 trillion SHIB tokens in Buterin’s public wallet are currently valued at over $15 billion, far exceeding the value of his Ether (ETH) holdings, which are currently worth just over $1.3 billion. It should be noted that Buterin’s wallet regularly receives uninvited donations of such coins, including from numerous other Dogecoin imitators. It seems some of Shiba Inu’s perceived value stems from the notion that Buterin’s tokens will remain untouched, however, not everyone appears to be in agreement.
CoinMarketCap attributes an $11-billion market cap valuation to the token, based on a unit price of $0.00002617 and a circulating supply of 394 billion SHIB. CoinGecko has not yet attributed a market cap value to Shiba Inu, as it still hasn’t determined its current coin supply.
Binance, which also owns CoinMarketCap, announced it would open up SHIB for trading in its innovation zone on May 10. The Binance announcement said of Shiba Inu:
“SHIBA INU (SHIB) is an experiment in decentralized community building and another meme coin similar to Dogecoin.”
“SHIB is the native token of SHIBA INU and will be the first token to be listed and used as an incentive for using ShibaSwap, a decentralized exchange,” it added.
The announcement does make note of Buterin’s holdings, highlighting his and two other wallets, warning: “Please note that, as of the time of writing, the top #1, #2 and #5 wallets hold 50.5%, 7.0% and 3.0% of total supply respectively.”
We reached out to Binance to ask how the presence of half a quadrillion SHIB in Buterin’s wallet affected its market cap calculations. This article will be updated should they reply.
Vitalik Buterin’s crypto holdings have doubled since January 2021 to surge above $1 billion.
Vitalik Buterin, a co-founder of the world’s most popular smart contract platform, the Ethereum blockchain, has officially become a crypto billionaire.
Buterin’s public Ether address, which he described as his main wallet back in 2018, has hit $1 billion on its balance following Ether’s meteoric rise above a $3,000 price mark on Monday.
At the time of writing, the address holds around 333,500 Ether (ETH) now worth $1.029 billion, according to on-chain data from Etherscan, as ETH more than quadrupled in value from around $700 at the beginning of 2021.
At publishing time, the world’s largest altcoin is trading at $3,144, up 8.6% over the past 24 hours, with gains of 36% over the past seven days, according to data from CoinGecko.
According to some online crypto players, 27-year-old Buterin now could be the youngest self-made billionaire in the cryptocurrency industry.
Vitalik Buterin is the youngest crypto billionaire #ETH #Ethereum #Crypto pic.twitter.com/7PfyPvbiC9
— JUSTIN (@justintrimble) May 2, 2021
Amid surging prices, Buterin has been generous with his crypto holdings. In late April, the Russian-Canadian programmer donated 100 Ether and 100 Maker (MKR) tokens to a COVID-19 relief fund for India.
Ethereum 2.0 is not a panacea, but its unbiased platform by design and mechanism might solve some of society’s problems.
We are in an unprecedented period of social, political and economic turmoil. As the decentralized financial infrastructure powering billions of dollars of value and building thousands of companies grows, we need to recognize instability around us. The systems, protocols and incentives we create now can be less susceptible to censorship, government overreach and misinformation.
Ethereum 2.0’s design has a number of attractive attributes that make it exceptionally well-positioned to reliably operate through the choppy waters ahead as a neutral infrastructure, not as a biased platform. Individuals, enterprises and governments can be confident that Ethereum 2.0 will continue functioning in the instance of individual or state-actor level attacks. It is a solid foundation on which to build economic and financial infrastructure.
Related: Ethereum 2.0: Less is more... and more is coming
Eth2’s features are particularly relevant when viewed through a broader socioeconomic context:
Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, wrote a convincing post suggesting credible neutrality, or “a basic effort to be fair,” which should be a guiding principle in protocol design:
“Note that it is not just neutrality that is required here, it is credible neutrality. That is, it is not just enough for a mechanism to not be designed to favor specific people or outcomes over others; it’s also crucially important for a mechanism to be able to convince a large and diverse group of people that the mechanism at least makes that basic effort to be fair.”
As he continues: “Mechanisms such as blockchains, political systems and social media are designed to facilitate cooperation across large, and diverse, groups of people. In order for a mechanism to actually be able to serve as this kind of common substrate, everyone participating must be able to see that the mechanism is fair, and everyone participating must be able to see that everyone else is able to see that the mechanism is fair, because everyone participating wants to be sure that everyone else will not abandon the mechanism the next day.”
Today, if there’s anything that people tend to agree on (at least in the United States) it is that “The economic system unfairly favors the powerful.” To avoid this fate and remain credibly neutral, Eth2 follows in Ethereum’s footsteps, eschewing on-chain governance, in favor of technical governance through rough consensus.
Related: DeFi-ing the odds: Why DeFi could rebuild trust in financial services
This design decision has two nice properties:
Rough consensus isn’t just applicable to or decided by the core developers, but the entire community. There have been many times in Ethereum’s history when the community made its voice heard on important issues to impact Ethereum’s direction. Programmatic proof-of-work, or ProgPoW, is the most recent example: Core developers achieved rough consensus to implement it, but the community did not, and therefore it was not implemented.
In a world that is increasingly polarized, Eth2 cannot favor or disadvantage any individual, entity or group, as it has no mechanism by which it can do so in the first place.
Cypherpunks were always worried about censorship by governments, but recent times have shown that censorship can also originate with individuals, enterprises and institutions. Eth2 is starting to underpin an entire parallel financial system, making it more important than ever that Eth2 can remain operational in the face of this type of attack.
Most importantly, Eth2 prioritizes liveness over correctness. Ethereum 2.0 researcher and tech developer Carl Beekhuizen outlined how Eth2 can continue producing blocks, even if there is a massive disruption that knocks a large number of validators offline, preventing the network from reaching finality. This robustness allows essential business functions to continue operating on Eth2, despite massive network disruptions.
Robustness is also why it’s so important that Eth2’s design is incredibly forgiving of downtime. Short amounts of uncorrelated downtime (minutes, or even days) have a relatively minor impact on rewards. Validators can change setups or migrate their nodes with confidence in the event of deplatforming, service interruptions or attacks.
On Eth2, validators default to being anonymous with no delegation. When someone attempts to censor, they will have a difficult time coercing a sufficient number of globally distributed, and mostly anonymous, validators to execute their will over an extended period of time.
In a time of irresponsible money-printing and rampant asset inflation, experts disagree on how to best protect yourself and where to invest your savings. The Federal Reserve has stated repeatedly that “There is an infinite amount of cash at the Federal Reserve,” and that it can print digitally at will, which leads many to question the long-term viability of the dollar and the safety of their savings.
Related: Bretton Woods 2.0 is knocking at our door, and it’s not here to help
Ether (ETH) incentivizes participation on Ethereum via mining rewards. It also serves as the base asset for the decentralized economy built on top of Ethereum by functioning as a base trading pair, loan collateral and more.
Eth2’s design builds upon and expands ETH’s moneyness characteristics in two ways:
Related: Ethereum Improvement Proposal 1559: Is the squeeze worth the juice?
The Ethereum community follows a policy of minimum viable issuance to keep the chain secure against attacks, such as double-spending. This approach is markedly different from today’s economies, in which central banks have tremendous control over monetary policy. Users, enterprises and governments can feel confident working with Eth2 because its base unit issuance is only used for one specific purpose: security, and that raison d'être cannot be repurposed to serve alternate goals. Additionally, the entire monetary policy is known and public, so everyone has equal insight and access to understand all protocol rules.
Many people, across the political spectrum, feel disempowered today, as politics and the economy seem totally disconnected from the real world and our everyday lives. The promise of crypto, for many, is flipping that dynamic on its head and giving power back to the individual. Eth2, in particular, shines here.
Eth2 allows any individual, enterprise or government to run validators, actively opt in to the rules of the protocol and enforce them for all other participants. It enables a sense of ownership, confidence and self-sovereignty that is harder to achieve solely as a consumer. It also enables all entities to trustlessly build and verify the state, which makes us all work from the same set of facts — a rare occurrence in today’s world.
Eth2 does not cap the validator active set, and only requires 32 ETH to spin up a validator. While not equally accessible to everyone, this sum is not unreasonable, as running a validator allows an entity to support the decentralized economy in perpetuity, while earning the crypto equivalent of the risk-free rate of return. And those with less than 32 ETH (most people) can always pool their funds using Kraken, Rocket Pool or other services to participate on Eth2.
This article does not contain investment advice or recommendations. Every investment and trading move involves risk, and readers should conduct their own research when making a decision.
The views, thoughts and opinions expressed here are the author’s alone and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of Cointelegraph.
Author thanks Vitalik Buterin for providing feedback on this piece.
There's little social value in helping make Elon Musk another $1 million in the NFT market, but the technology can still be put to good use, says Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin.
Ethereum co-creator Vitalik Buterin believes NFTs can be applied to socially relevant causes such as charities and funding public goods, but not while the technology is still viewed as a “casino that largely benefits already-wealthy celebrities.”
The author of the Ethereum whitepaper said there was little social value in helping celebrities like Elon Musk add another $1 million to their bank balance by selling NFTs. But he does believe that with support and coordination, non-fungible tokens could have a significant impact on other areas of society.
In a blog post titled “The Most Important Scarce Resource is Legitimacy,” Buterin said public attention and resources are often allocated to whatever most people perceive to have legitimacy — a game theory term which he defines as:
“A pattern of higher-order acceptance. An outcome in some social context is legitimate if the people in that social context broadly accept and play their part in enacting that outcome, and each individual person does so because they expect everyone else to do the same.”
In short, people act in a coordinated fashion if they perceive that everyone else will do the same, and especially if it benefits them personally. The NFT market, which has seen half a billion dollars in volume in the last few months alone, is also swayed by the ever-changing forces of mass public perception.
“Which NFTs people find attractive to buy, and which ones they do not, is a question of legitimacy,” said Buterin.
“If everyone agrees that one NFT is interesting and another NFT is lame, then people will strongly prefer buying the first, because it would have both higher value for bragging rights and personal pride in holding it, and because it could be resold for more because everyone else is thinking in the same way,” he added.
The influence and pull exacted by celebrities such as Elon Musk is potentially enormous. The Tesla CEO has been credited with moving the Bitcoin (BTC) and wider cryptocurrency market on numerous occasions, both positively and negatively. The attention brought to NFTs by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was commendable, said Buterin, referring to the social media chief’s decision to auction off his “first tweet” NFT to charity for $2.9 million.
But, if the focus remains on such people then the potential for NFTs to have any real social impact could be lost, claims Ethereum’s co-founder:
“But they could also be a missed opportunity: there is little social value in helping Elon Musk earn yet another $1 million by selling his tweet when, as far as we can tell, the money is just going to himself (and, to his credit, he eventually decided not to sell). If NFTs simply become a casino that largely benefits already-wealthy celebrities, that would be a far less interesting outcome.”
Buterin suggested two potential ways to help make NFTs more “legitimate” as a method of acting as a funding mechanism for causes which in some way promoted a social good.
Buterin said a decentralized autonomous organization could be set up which, with the collective approval of its decentralized governance community, would “sanction” certain NFTs if it was guaranteed that a portion of the sales revenue would be passed on to charitable causes.
Another way would be to work with social media platforms to integrate NFT displays into users’ profiles, allowing them to show off the thing they invested their money into. In combination with the first idea, wrote Buterin, this approach could work to “nudge users toward NFTs that contribute to valuable social causes.”