In May 2021, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin gave away almost all of the Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens that its creators had sent him. He donated 50 trillion SHIB, then worth about $1.2 billion
In May 2021, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin gave away almost all of the Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens that its creators had sent him. He donated 50 trillion SHIB, then worth about $1.2 billion, to a COVID-19 relief fund in India.
Days later, he burned 410.24 trillion SHIB, then worth about $6.74 billion, by sending it to an address no one can spend from. That one transaction still accounts for most of all SHIB ever burned. SHIB traded near $0.0000054 on October 9, 2026.
He never bought it. SHIB launched in August 2020 as a memecoin, a token driven mainly by community and online culture. Its anonymous creator, known as Ryoshi, set a total supply of 1 quadrillion tokens and sent half of it to Buterin’s public wallet. The other half was locked as liquidity on Uniswap, the decentralized exchange.
CoinDesk described the gift as “what appeared to be a marketing stunt.” Linking a token to a well-known name can lift its price. In the two weeks before May 10, 2021, SHIB rose nearly 900% to $0.00003791.
He acted in two steps over five days.
The DonationOn May 12, 2021, Buterin sent 50 trillion SHIB to the India Covid Relief Fund. Polygon co-founder Sandeep Nailwal had set up the fund in April, and Buterin had already given it about $600,000 in ether and MKR that month. According to Forbes, Buterin made other gifts on May 12:
Nailwal pledged to handle the SHIB with care: “We will not do anything which hurts any community specially the retail community involved with SHIB.”
Late on Sunday, May 16, 2021, U.S. time, Buterin burned 410.24 trillion SHIB. A burn sends tokens to a “dead” address whose private key no one holds, which removes them from circulation for good.
“I’ve decided to burn 90% of the remaining shiba tokens in my wallet,” he wrote. He said he did not want to be “a locus of power of that kind.” He added that token creators should send tokens to charities, not to him. The last 10% of his holdings was set aside for a charity he had not yet chosen.
The donation hit the price hard. Forbes reported that SHIB fell 36% in 24 hours, and AKITA fell more than 50%. The burn had little effect: SHIB rose about 2% on the news, to $0.00001651.
The fall cut the donation’s real value. By late July 2021, Nailwal estimated the SHIB gift would end up worth about $400 million, not $1.2 billion, Protos reported. The fund converted the tokens to dollars and then rupees, a slow process under India’s Foreign Contribution Regulation Act. By then, about $20 million had gone to food distribution and small intensive-care wards in rural India.
The burned tokens can never move again, but their paper value still changes with the price:
The main SHIB burn address held 410.44 trillion SHIB on October 9, CryptoTicker reported, about 41% of the original supply. Nearly all of that is Buterin’s 2021 transaction.
Today’s burns are tiny by comparison. A single transaction on October 7 burned about 298 million SHIB, and SHIB still fell about 5% that day. Over the last 30 days, 707.5 million SHIB were burned, worth about $3,820.
CryptoTicker’s Alexander Schmidt wrote on October 9 that burns at that pace, 0.000121% of supply per month, are “not a meaningful supply lever.” He pointed out that daily trading of $91.7 million far outweighs a month of burns.
Recent developments include:
SHIB has a market cap of about $3.17 billion, with 589.24 trillion tokens in circulation.
Buterin received half of SHIB’s supply without asking for it. He donated 50 trillion tokens to COVID-19 relief in India and burned 410.24 trillion more, about 41% of the original supply. His burn remains the largest in SHIB’s history, while current daily burns remove only small amounts.
