Vitalik Buterin's $1B crypto donation to India Covid Relief fund | Hacker News Reader

Vitalik Buterin's $1B crypto donation to India Covid Relief fund

etherscan.io

36 pointsthrowkeep11 comments

Step by step analysis! https://twitter.com/FrankResearcher/status/13925328318893957... Vitalik's wallet: https://etherscan.io/address/0xab5801a7d398351b8be11c439e05c... His new wallet: https://etherscan.io/address/0x220866b1a2219f40e72f5c628b65d...

When they dump their Shib, as many charities are required by law to do, nothing near $1B will be received. This is still a a massive donation to charity, and just one of many that vitalik just did: All AKITA tokens to Gitcoin Community Multi-Sig 13,292 ETH to Givewell 1000 ETH + all ELON tokens - Methuselah Foundation 1050 ETH - MIRI (AI safety org) 500 ETH + 10% of the SHIB - @CryptoRelief_

500 ETH - Charter Cities Institute

Help me understand this. So it looks like Vitalik sent "$1 Billion dollars worth" of SHIB tokens to the relief fund. He did this because he got 50 trillion SHIB tokens airdropped to his personal Ethereum wallet.

So how in the world is he going to get taxed on such an event?

That's honestly one of the parts I'm most intrigued by. It would seem that he would owe income tax for the airdrop (not sure what the "price" for the airdrop would be though, and if it's anywhere near the current price, it would be absurd). Then, in theory he gets a tax writeoff for the transferred tokens, but given the percentage of the total supply, the charity is unlikely to get anywhere near that amount for it?

Also, presumably the charity is going to dump... all of these tokens on the market to get USD.

>Then, in theory he gets a tax writeoff for the transferred tokens, but given the percentage of the total supply, the charity is unlikely to get anywhere near that amount for it?

sounds like how a lot of art "donations" work.

The charity is apparently not dumping it to "protect the investors"

>We have decided to convert the donation slowly over a period of time.

https://twitter.com/CryptoRelief_/status/1392559057764962304

Why was he airdropped SHIB tokens? Did they distribute to ETH holders?

Shib’s creators donated 50% of all shiba ($11B worth) to Vitalik to create scarcity.

Only to Vitalik, presumably as a marketing tool.

I think it was part of the initial tokenomics, sort of an appeal to authority, if the team withdrew all their liquidity he could come in and supply the rest as liquidity, the entire project is a meme ponzi scheme IMO and it adds to the meme factor. the same effect could have been done with a contract proving liquidity couldn’t be removed.

I think he actually converted it to eth before donating. I believe he lives in Singapore which doesn't have tax on crypto (unless you're a business, etc).

If he was in the US, it's pretty straightforward, I believe he would have income tax on the initial value of the SHIB tokens received (which is messed up, since he didn't actually want it), then capital gains tax on the gains between the time he received and converted to ETH.

If they were worth near nothing when he got them then the tax would be small. Sending them is probably another taxable event but most countries allow you to write off charitable contributions

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