Vitalik Buterin sold large quantities of 28 different meme coins today, donating the proceeds to his charity, Kanro. In total, the value of these coins amounted to around 984,000 USDC.

Some of these assets saw violent price swings in the aftermath of the sale, but there was no clear consistency between them. Several meme coins fell by more than 50%, while others rose over 100%.

Vitalik Buterin Offloads Meme Coins for Charity

Vitalik Buterin, the founder of Ethereum, has conducted several meme coin sales for charity in recent months. In December, he donated 88 ETH to the Khao Kheow Open Zoo, home of Moo Deng. Following this endorsement, the MOODENG coin rallied significantly.

In October, he also offloaded over $2 million in meme coins, giving the proceeds to other charities.

This time, Buterin sent all the meme coin money to one particular charity called ‘Kanro.’ It’s one of his own non-profit organizations dedicated to fighting pandemics.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Buterin has shown increasing interest in making donations and contributing to research on preventing communicable diseases. For instance, back in 2021, the Ethereum founder donated nearly $1 billion to help fight the pandemic in India.

Also, Buterin has been a constant advocate for using meme coins as a means of giving back to the community beyond speculative trading. Today’s sell-offs reflected this notion. He sold 80.47 trillion JSHIBA tokens for 21,466 USDC, while 92,000 DOGE tokens were worth 35,233 USDC.

Nearly all of the assets were sold for less than 100,000 USDC, but this could mean offloading a few thousand or many trillions.

In other words, his act of charity has wrought real havoc on some of these smaller assets. For example, DINU fell 68%, while ESTEE rose over 100%. Some of these meme coins had small market value and poor pool depth, so Buterin caused a major disruption.

However, this did not amount to a consistent crash, as several assets ended up benefitting. These dramatic swings highlight the volatile character of meme coins, even compared to other cryptoassets.

It seems unlikely that Buterin planned to consciously spike any of them. Indeed, on several occasions last year, a major sell-off and donation from him caused the underlying meme coins to jump. This sale was very recent, so similar benefits may yet happen.