Vitalik Buterin reveals some intriguing details on the process he underwent to burn almost $7B worth of SHIB sent to him by SHIB’s founders.
Yesterday, the UpOnly podcast interviewed Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. Buterin chatted with Cobie and Ledger on the FTX-affiliated podcast for nearly two hours, during which he revealed the complexity of burning 90% of 500 trillion tokens. The SHIB tokens were donated to Buterin who donated 10% to the India Covid Crypto Relief Fund, which stood at $1.2 billion at the time. He burned 90% of it (worth about $7 billion) at the time because he “didn’t want to be a place of power like that.”
Shiba Inu is an ETH-based meme token which was up 40 000 000% last year, making holders very rich very quickly. Buterin told the podcast that he had to buy a new laptop from Target to do the burn transaction. The funds he received from the SHIB founders were held in a cold paper wallet. He had to use the two numbers to get the private key. “One of those numbers was with me; the other was with my family in Canada,” said Buterin. He phoned his family in Canada to acquire the other number. He then entered the private key into his new computer. Furthermore, he generated an Ethereum transaction to send ETH to the charity. Buterin then downloaded a program that generated QR codes. Thereafter, he scanned the QR code for the transaction with his mobile, copied it to the laptop, then put it into etherscan.io/pushTx. Then he started sending out the tokens.
The future of Ethereum
About Ethereum, Buterin said he sees it as a big part of his future. Vitalik says Ethereum is still aiming for $0.05 per transaction and that rollups and sharding are the way to go when it comes to scaling without sacrificing security or decentralization. He predicts that transaction costs will drop below $0.05 “within a few years.” He also said that progress on the Ethereum ZK-rollup VM is going well and most nodes will not store a full chain.
Low transaction costs achievable
A roll-up is a layer two solution on Ethereum, where transactions are executed off the main Ethereum chain, while transaction data gets posted on layer 1. The concept of sharding is borrowed from traditional databases and refers to the horizontal scaling of a database, similar to increasing the number of lanes on a highway to reduce congestion. Ethereum is currently highly congested, leading to very high gas fees. Gas powers computation on Ethereum.
