Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum blockchain has officially become a crypto billionaire. The news is as a result of the recent surge in price of ETH, which rose above $3,000 on Monday. In 2018, Buterin described his public Ether address as his main wallet, which has hit $1 billion on its balance.
All of the large trades. I also have some other addresses, but they're quite small relatively speaking.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) October 10, 2018
Currently, online data from Etherscan indicates that the wallet holds 333,520 Ether with the value at $1.040 billion. The value of Ether has quadrupled from around $700 at the start of the year to the current price above $3k.
At the time of publishing, data from Coingecko indicates that Ether, the largest altcoin is trading at $3169, a 8.5% increase in the last 24 hours. The highest trading price in the last 24 hours is recorded at $3199.25.
The news about Buterin have been trending on Twitter, with some crypto players naming him the youngest self-made crypto billionaire. A particular tweet from Justin Trimble who describes himself as a NFT collector named the 27-year old as the youngest billionaire.
🔥Vitalik Buterin is the youngest crypto billionaire 🔥#ETH #Ethereum #Crypto pic.twitter.com/7PfyPvbiC9
— JUSTIN // BrainDrops: A Platform for AI-Gen Art (@justintrimble) May 2, 2021
Buterin has been known to be very generous and transparent with information regarding his Ether holdings. However, what has not been talked about as much is his generosity to needy causes. In late April, Buterin, a Russian-Canadian programmer donated 100 ETH and 100 Maker to an Indian Covid-19 relief fund.
With the market in a bull run, players are optimistic that the ETH $3k value is still the beginning for the altcoin. As the world’s most popular smart contract platform, Ethereum has a lot of platforms using its platform to build ecosystems. Therefore, the demand and use of Ether is high and keeps increasing as more platforms benefit from the smart contract feature.
The value of the coin has been steadily increasing since the beginning of the year, with the increase currently at 1381.9%. in the last month, there has been a 48.6% increase. This is one of the biggest growths the market has recorded.
Ethereum is currently planning an upgrade aimed to solve the blockchain trilemma; security, scalability and decentralization. When this upgrade scheduled to be unveiled in three phases is complete, it is believed that more projects and users can benefit from Ethereum. Therefore, the price is expected to go up upon the upgrade.
It will be interesting to see the value of Ether in a year, with or without Ethereum 2.0, and the impact its growth will have on Buterin’s crypto holdings worth.
Image by Peter Patel from Pixabay
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