Explained | Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin destroys 90% of his Shiba Inu holdings; here's what it means

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With cryptocurrency Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin's announcement of burning 90 percent of his Shiba Inu holdings and donating the rest, the investors of crypto coin are in a dilemma.

A report by financial news website Business Insider stated that over 40 percent of the coin's total circulation have thereby been taken out of the market. Meanwhile, Buterin had said that burning and donating the coins was the only option.

Earlier, Buterin was given 50 percent of all Shiba Inu tokens by the coin's creators. Regarding his decision to burn the digital currency, Buterin had cited that this was the only method through which he could avoid his transactions in Shiba Inu being interpreted as actions.

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Among other things, he had requested coin creators not to send large amounts of tokens to individuals or charities without their consent.

Before moving forward, what is Shiba Inu?

Created in August 2020 by someone named Ryoshi, Shibu Inu is a joke coin or meme coin which was launched as a rival to Dogecoin, which is also a cryptocoin. The coin has been named after the Japanese dog breed, Shiba Inu. The mascot of Shiba Inu, which is based on the Shiba pup, was claimed to be the ‘Dogecoin Killer’ when it was launched.

What is the difference between Shibu Inu and Dogecoin?

While Dogecoin was developed using the same technology as Bitcoin, Shibu Inu is powered by Ethereum. Shibu Inu are ERC-20 tokens which are fungible, while non-fungible tokens (NFTs) use the ERC-721 token standard of the Ethereum platform.

Among the major difference that Shibu Inu tokens have is that one can hold billions and trillions of them.

How to trade in Shibu Inu tokens?

Shibu Inu tokens can be traded in India through WazirX, which wrongly listed it as Rs 3 on Thursday, while the firm claimed a misconfiguration caused the listing at a higher value. Following this, the price crashed to 0.0015 levels.

Apart from this, Shibu Inu can be traded through Uniswap and the web version of CoinDCX, which allows buying and selling cryptocurrencies for ETH and other Ethereum-based tokens. They can only be traded in USD/BUSD.

What does it mean to burn them?

Looking at Buterin's decision to burn 90 percent of the Shibu Inu holdings, an investor or a trader needs to understand that "burning" a crypto token means sending it to a public address that is inaccessible, where it will then lay unused.

Till now, over 40 percent of Shiba Inu tokens have now been burned, which amounts to around 410 trillion coins worth around $7 billion.

What is Shibu Inu tokens' value?

On May 17, Shibu Inu rose by over 40 percent to $0.00001953 after Buterin's statement. The coin was last up 0.6 percent in the 24 hours to 08:17 ET, trading at $0.0000161, according to CoinMarketCap data.