They were given half of a cryptocurrency without asking... and he used it to save lives
We continue week 8 with a short story, but one that leaves a good aftertaste.
August 2020: Shiba Inu is born, another meme-coin inspired by Dogecoin, created by someone anonymous under the name "Ryoshi". As a symbolic gesture, Ryoshi did something unusual from day one: he sent half of the entire token supply, 505 trillion SHIB, directly to Vitalik Buterin’s wallet, cofounder of Ethereum. Without letting him know. Without asking permission.
The intention was clear: if Vitalik never touched them, they would be “locked” forever, reducing supply and giving the coin more weight.
For almost a year, those tokens stayed there, dormant, with no action from Vitalik. Until May 2021, when SHIB surged more than 1,200% in a week and that unsolicited gift was suddenly worth billions of dollars.
That’s when Vitalik made a decision no one expected: instead of selling and walking away with an instant fortune, he donated 50 trillion SHIB (about $1 billion) to the Covid-19 relief fund in India during a devastating wave of infections in that country. And with the rest, he did something even more radical: he burned 410 trillion tokens, sending them to an unreachable address—removing them forever from circulation.
In a single weekend, he “burned” a fortune of $6.7 billion that legally was already his.
What’s astonishing is the contrast: in an ecosystem where most of these stories are about people accumulating or losing fortunes by accident, here someone received billions without asking for them and decided, on their own, to keep nothing.
What would you have done in his place: donate everything like he did, or keep at least part of it?
If you liked this, follow me: on Friday I’ll close week 8 with another story you still haven’t heard.