The wunderkind of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, is making headlines again today for parceling out his own ETH holdings into different wallets, and possibly contemplating the sale of some of these assets.
We’re seeing tech reports today that Buterin sold $45,000 worth of Ethereum after ETH value jumped 20% last week.
Some chronicling this activity are unconcerned.
“(Buterin’s) selling shouldn’t be a source of concern,” writes Dalmas Ngetich at Coingape. “Vitalik is one of the largest holders of ETH, is a true believer, and the poster boy of the project. His technical adeptness and dedication, providing guidance to his team, means that Vitalik isn’t dumping his coins and gradually diversifying away. “
Also, in the grand scheme of things, $45,000 worth of Ethereum is not a lot of Ethereum, at least in comparison to Buterin’s overall stake. It’s also not the first time that the ETH pioneer has been under the microscope for this type of trading activity, often on a larger scale. Just last Christmas, we had reports of analyst fears that Buterin could end up dumping $25 million.
“Records from monitoring resource Etherscan showed a total of 92,000 ETH (currently worth $11.5 million) move from a single wallet to U.S. exchange Kraken on Dec. 25,” William Suberg at Cointelegraph reported the day after Christmas.
One of the common denominators, according to tech reporters, is Buterin’s predilection for spreading out his assets in different wallet schemes prior to making sales.
“(The current) liquidation was spotted by one keen analyst who notes that the co-founder has been selling his holdings from time to time,” Ngetich writes today. “He also observes that Vitalik has been sending his funds to different addresses before selling.”
All of this comes as the Ethereum community races to adopt new proof of stake protocols intended to enhance the overall system’s security and utility.
“The Ethereum 2.0 Topaz testnet was launched on April 16 by Prysmatic Labs, an engineering team working on the Ethereum 2.0 technical infrastructure, replacing the previous Sapphire test network,” writes Liam Frost at Decrypt in coverage today. “One of the key goals for Topaz is to test the Phase 0 proof-of-stake (PoS) protocol implementation on Ethereum 2.0, to which the network will eventually transfer from the current computationally-intensive proof-of-work consensus mechanism.”
In light of this, should routine profit taking by Buterin move crowds to horror? You decide.
