Ethereum Creator Vitalik Buterin Thanks Shiba Inu ($SHIB) Community

Ethereum ($ETH) creator Vitalik Buterin has used some of the Shiba Inu ($SHIB) tokens he was gifted to fund a PhD fellowship program. 

According to a report by Decrypt, on Wednesday (July 20), Buterin thanked the Shiba Inu community for helping him realize his dream of creating a PhD fellowship fund to support research in the “safe development and deployment” of AI.

Last year, Buterin was gifted 50% of Shiba Inu’s total token supply by the project’s anonymous developers in order to remove the coins from circulation. Buterin responded by destroying 90% of these tokens, worth more than $32.5 billion at their price peak. 

At the time, Buterin said he did not want to be a “locus of power” by holding that amount of $SHIB. However, Ethereum’s co-founder has used some of the remaining tokens to fund a new PhD fellowship focused on AI Existential Safety. Buterin announced in a tweet the first class that would be receiving his fellowship, saying they will work to ensure that AI becomes “the best rather than worst thing to happen to humanity.”

In a subsequent tweet Buterin also gave a “big thanks” to the Shiba Inu community for giving him the funds to make his fellowship possible. 

In addition to funding the research fellowship, Buterin donated the majority of the 50 trillion $SHIB to the India COVID Crypto Relief Fund. At the time, the funds were worth close to $1.2 billion. 

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Featured Image by LeandroDeCarvalho via Pixabay