ETH Founder Buterin’s $100 Mln Shiba Inu Fund Backs Anti-COVID Efforts

In May 2021, Ethereum (ETH) co-founder Vitalik Buterin donated over $1.5 billion in cryptocurrencies to help India in the fight against Covid-19. The grant included around 50 trillion Shiba Inu (SHIB) tokens and 500 ETH tokens.

As per reports, over $400 million worth of SHIB tokens were sold to utilise the fund over health related projects. However, $100 million worth of SHIB tokens were reportedly sent back to the Buterin at the beginning of 2022. The Ethereum co-founder moved this fund to create a new charity body named Balvi.

Balvi has now rolled out its first round of grants, according to the Ethereum founder.

Balvi gives grants to anti-COVID efforts

ETH co-founder as a major advocate of decentralisation. In a post, Buterin suggests that the future of bio defence is decentralized, open, and collaborative.

Buterin aims to use this trust to work on Covid science and support other relied projects. He shared some updates regarding the first round of funding recipients of this fund. Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (RaDVac) has received the first round of funding of $2.5 million from Balvi.

Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (RadVac) has received the first round of funding of $2.5 million from Balvi. The projects focus on the open source Covid vaccine R&D. The firm will be using this fund to develop vaccines worldwide in an easy manner to close down the access gap.

In this bid, another Open Source project to develop UV lamps to kill the virus also received the grant. The UVGI project has been able to send kits to three countries with different modifications. Buterin shared that another trust has received $3 million in donations to research on Long Covid symptoms.

ETH founder concerned over surging gas fees

Much anticipated Ethereum merge date or ETH 2.0 saw a delay till the 3rd quarter of the year. Recently, Buterin raised concern over Ethereum layer-1 transaction fees. He believes that ETH gas fees should go down to $0.05 to become more acceptable.