Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin asked projects looking to leverage his name for credibility to donate coins to charities rather than sending them to him.
Anti-malaria, pandemic response, mitigating extreme poverty, life extension research, mitigating existential risks (including AI) and thinking about the multimillion-year future of humanity are all very important and undervalued issues and will continue to be for quite a while.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) November 9, 2022
“Much like credible neutrality, try credible benevolence!” Buterin wrote in his Twitter thread. He went on to highlight perceived flaws in the current practice of effective altruism.
I think the effective altruism community’s most underrated weakness is not having a good theory of effectively allocating *social* capital. Especially if you’re well-known, you’re not just giving out money, but also reallocating public attention, inspiring the next generation…
This is in response to a recent trend of meme coins attempting to gain traction and credibility by transferring a chunk of the supply to the Ethereum co-founder.
In October, anonymous entities developed tokens prompted by words used by Buterin in his tweets. Buterin speculated that a project called “THE Protocol” would be extremely easy to sell out because supporters could say, “Look, so and so mentioned THE!” when referring to pretty much anything, which led to over two dozen $THE meme coins traded on Ethereum and Binance Chain.
In addition, people also began to bet on “DIE”, the German word for “the,” with some tokens attracting hundreds of thousands of dollars in liquidity.
Like Shiba Inu before them, these tokens sent a percentage of the supply to the Ethereum co-founder.
Buterin advises all dog coin/word coin users not to issue tokens to him. “If you *must* abuse my name, give the supply directly to those orgs and market it as “X% of supply donated to Vitalik-endorsed charities”. But better just talk about the causes directly,” he stated.
Replying to Butering Binance’s Changpeng Zhao (CZ) pointed out that making donations with the top 10 cryptocurrencies was better. “If you are making a donation, use a top 10 existing coin. Issuing a coin causes all kinds of problems. Is it for your own benefit (coins you hold) or charity? Not to mention the liquidity issues, inflated valuations, etc..” CZ wrote.
In addition to being known as the creator of Ethereum, Buterin is also an established philanthropist. Last year, Buterin donated 50 trillion SHIB from the Shiba Inu project, worth over $1 billion, to aid in Covid relief efforts in India.
