Buterin Thanks SHIB Community For Funding Fellowship Program

Ethereum’s co-founder Vitalik Buterin thanks SHIB Community for helping to fund a fellowship program after he was gifted billions of dollars in Shiba Inu tokens so let’s read more today in our latest Ethereum news.

Buterin thanks SHIB Community for helping make his Ph.D. fellowship fund a reality. The Shiba Inu developers gifted Buterin a loan of SHIB tokens last year and sent him 50% of the total supply to address to remove it from circulation. Buterin who is known in the crypto space for his gestures decided to burn 90% of the tokens in his wallet and chose to give the rest to charity which was worth about $1.2 billion at the time to the India Covid Crypto Relief fund. He used some of the cash to fund a Ph.D. program to research the safe development and deployment of artificial intelligence technology:

“Big thanks to the Shiba Inu community, whose cryptocurrency made these fellowships possible.”

Please welcome our first class of @VitalikButerin
Fellows in AI Existential Safety, and consider collaborating with them to ensure that AI become the best rather than worst thing to happen to humanity! https://t.co/El90YF95Xr pic.twitter.com/dKVX94upOM

— Max Tegmark (@tegmark) July 20, 2022

The Postdoctoral Fellowship in AI Existential Safety by Vitalik Buterin is designed to support promising researchers for postdoctoral appointments that started in the fall semester of 2022 to work on the AI existential safety research as the website says and adds that the funding is for three years subject for annual renewables based on the progress reports. SHIB is the 12^th biggest crypto in the world with a market cap of $7.5 billion and it is an ERC-20 token as a DOGE competitor.

Just like DOGE, the token is speculative and doesn’t have a lot of utility but people made huge returns from investing in it. The price surged since launching in August 2020 and at one point, Buterin decided to destroy the crypto while it had a market value of $32.5 billion. He chose to cash it out and made himself the richest man in crypto. He, however, said:

“I don’t want to be a locus of power of that kind.”

Right now, the data from CoinGecko shows that SHIB is trading for $0.0000129 per token which is a 6% increase in the past 24 hours. The token however is down by 85.9% from the October ATH.

As recently reported, Shiba Inu became immensely popular in 2021 due to the strogn meme and community support. The ecosystem is looking to launch a layer 2 network, a stablecoin, and a play-to-earn game. With almost no information available, it’s still unclear whether Shiba can get past its meme coin status as the developers crafted a few initiatives to help what started out as a meme token gain traction as a legitimate project.