Vitalik Buterin To Donate $100M From Shiba Inu Refunds To COVID Relief Projects

India’s CryptoRelief fund will send $100 million of last year's donated Shiba Inu SHIB/USD tokens back to Ethereum ETH/USD co-founder Vitalik Buterin.

What Happened: In a Twitter update on Friday, Polygon MATIC/USD co-founder Sandeep Nailwal said that CryptoRelief had opted to send $100 million in USDC USDC/USD back to Buterin to expedite relief efforts.

Vitalik being a non-Indian can do it in a more accelerated way by being able to do faster decision making and deploying to projects which have higher risk but high rewards too.

— Sandeep | Polygon  (@sandeepnailwal) January 28, 2022

Buterin said that he intends to personally deploy the refunded SHIB funds into “higher risk higher rewards” COVID science and relief projects worldwide.

CryptoRelief sending $100m of the $SHIBA funds back to me. I plan to personally deploy these funds with the help of science advisors to complement CryptoRelief's existing excellent work with some higher-risk higher-reward covid science and relief projects worldwide. https://t.co/xvHxzwwdn8

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) January 28, 2022

“I've cofounded a new org (Balvi) to direct these funds, which is in a better position to make these bets which will are very-high-value and global in nature and bring great benefit to Indians and non-Indians,” stated Buterin.

“Projects will include vaccine R&D, innovative approaches to air filtration and ventilation, testing, and much more.”

In July 2021, Benzinga reported that the $1 billion SHIB tokens donated by Buterin to India’s COVID relief efforts were not reaching people at an adequate pace due to several issues.

Some of these issues included SHIB’s price crashing over 50% following the donation and India’s regulations with respect to converting the tokens into local currency.

Price Action: As of Monday morning, SHIB was trading at $0.00002067, down 5.77% in the last 24 hours.