Vitalik Buterin surprised the crypto community after a seemingly sudden decision to make several $100K worth of ETH donations to various projects focused on the development of software solutions for the Ethereum network.
A Small Debate Sparked it All
The situation came after a debate via Twitter with Ameen Soleimani, CEO of SpankChain, who highlighted the need to work on the scalability and speed of this blockchain, which for almost its entire lifetime has been the most important blockchain after Bitcoin, being recently surpassed by Ripple (in terms of market cap).
To an answer from Mr. Buterin mentioning that the Ethereum development team was almost 100% close to completing a solution to the scalability problem with Ethereum 2.0, Soleimani made a series of comments suggesting the possibility that there could be faster advances if there were more collaborators outside the Ethereum team working on improving the blockchain.
In response to Soleimani’s reflections, Preston Van Loon of Prysmatic Labs made a comment pointing out that being a relatively small startup, they could not devote themselves entirely to working on developments for Ethereum as they had other projects to accomplish.
After this tweet, Vitalik simply decided to send 1000 ETH in support of the project because… YOLO
Just sent 1000 eth. Yolo.https://t.co/s1q8K5Wlhs
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) December 19, 2018
After making this donation, Paul Hauner, a developer at Lighthouse, wrote Vitalik a tweet commenting that the team could “certainly turn 1k ETH into more developers”. Vitalik Buterin responded by accepting the request and sent another 1000 ETH to the developer team.
Guess I have to ?
(Though precommitment: this is the last one)
Same instruction as to Mikerah: please put the address somewhere on https://t.co/gz5CS5usfn so I can verify you’re not an evil hacker working for @northkoreadprk gov trying to *increase* the world’s centralization
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) December 19, 2018
So, @VitalikButerin just contributed 1,000 ETH to #lighthouse development. We’re very appreciative for this and will turn it into dev power! ❤️ We’re going to progressively liquidate it into $$ as it is relatively stable compared to labor. Look forward to more Eth 2.0 progress! https://t.co/Vj1Ud4oGeA
— Paul Hauner (@paulhauner) December 19, 2018
Finally, Twitter user Mikerah decided to test his luck by telling Vitalik he would leave his studies at the University of Toronto to dedicate himself full-time to the development of Ethereum 2.0 with ChainSafe Systems if he received a similar donation, Vitalik also accepted.
Your website needs a donation address for the client!
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) December 19, 2018
Vitalik Buterin May Be Tweeting “YOLO”, But Perhaps Nobody Takes Ethereum More Seriously Than Him
In the end, Vitalik Buterin donated 300k USD to Ethereum. The benefited projects are focused on developing solutions to scale Ethereum.
The problem of scalability is of particular importance for this community precisely because of its popularity that makes it the preferred platform for the development of decentralized applications, despite the fact that other projects such as EOS and Tron claim to be much more efficient.
BTW… Vitalik did not give away any more ETH; however, given the number of users that asked him for donations, he decided to send some random altcoins too ?
Sent you 100 TPT: https://t.co/ttL6bNjBTB
No idea what TPT is, just some random coin I got airdropped for some reason. So you can keep it.
— Vitalik Non-giver of Ether (@VitalikButerin) December 19, 2018
