Vitalik Buterin thanks the SHIB community for helping fund the scholarship program

The co-founder of Ethereum has received billions of dollars in Shiba Inu tokens. But he decided to dedicate them to a good cause.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin today thanked the Shiba Inu community for contributing to his PhD scholarship program.

Last year, the developers of Shiba Inu offered Vitalik Buterin a large amount of SHIB tokens. In fact, they sent him 50% of the total offer to the address to withdraw it from circulation.

But Vitalik Buterin decided to burn 90% of the chips in his wallet. He then chose to donate the remaining 10% to charity, including 50 trillion SHIB, or about $1.2 billion at the time, to the India Covid Crypto Relief Fund.

Big thanks to the Shiba Inu community, whose cryptocurrency made these fellowships possible!

– vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) July 20, 2022

And he used some of the money to fund a PhD research program on the safe development and deployment of AI. “Big thanks to the Shiba Inu community, whose crypto-currency made these scholarships possible“, Buterin wrote on Twitter on Wednesday in response to a tweet naming the scholarship winners.

The Vitalik Buterin Postdoctoral Fellowship in Existential AI Safety is “designed to support promising researchers for postdoctoral appointments beginning in the fall 2022 semester to work on research in AI existential safety” the program’s website says, adding that funding is for three years, subject to annual renewals based on satisfactory progress reports.

SHIB is the 12th largest crypto-currency in the world with a market capitalization of $7.5 billion. The ERC-20 token is a competitor to Dogecoin and is based on a famous dog meme on the Internet.

Like DOGE, this token is highly speculative and has little to no use, but some people have made huge profits investing in it. Its price has skyrocketed since its launch in August 2020.

At one point, the crypto that Buterin decided to destroy had a market value of $32.5 billion. Had he chosen to cash it in, it would have made him not only the richest man in crypto but also one of the richest men in the world.

“I don’t want to be a place of power like that“, he said at the time.

Currently, coingecko data shows SHIB trading at $0.0000129 per token – a 6% increase over 24 hours. But the token is also down 85.92% from its all-time high of $0.00008845 in October 2021.