Vitalik Buterin sold the memecoin inspired by Moo Deng, Thailand's viral baby pygmy hippo, to raise funds for anti-airborne disease technology research, causing their prices to soar.
Vitalik Buterin sold the memecoin inspired by Moo Deng, Thailand's viral baby pygmy hippo, to raise funds for anti-airborne disease technology research, causing their prices to soar.
Buterin, who was handed 62 billion MOODENG tokens by the project developer a month ago, has been gradually trimming that position to 40 billion through a series of transactions.
In the latest transfer, he moved roughly 10 billion tokens into CoW Swap, a decentralized exchange. The sale yielded $181,000 in ETH for an entity named Kanro, created by Buterin for charitable causes.
The Ethereum-based meme token was launched a week earlier and has surged 480% in the past 24 hours. Its market capitalization, currently at $86 million, is lower than the $102 million created on Solana but this price action shows just how much difference Buterin's involvement can make. The token had doubled in price prior to the sale made by Buterin and almost tripled in price after news spread on social media.
The original Solana-based Moo Deng token has a success story of its own. An anonymous trader invested about $800, or 6 SOL, a couple of hours after the token's launch. That position then ballooned to an astonishing $7.5 million by Friday—more than doubling from $3.5 million the previous day, according to blockchain intelligence firm Arkham Intelligence.
The donation also continues Buterin's prior philanthropy. In April, he donated $532,000 of Ethereum to the Effective Altruism Fund's Animal Welfare Fund shortly after suggesting that the class of meme coins could be used for a "positive-sum" purpose rather than simple speculation.
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