Vitalik Buterin transfers 14,000 ETH, sends 500,000 USD to the Kanro fund

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has transferred 14,000 ETH from personal wallets and sent $500,000 to the Kanro charity organization he founded, according to on-chain data from Arkham Intelligence.

This move comes after Buterin announced he would withdraw approximately $44.7 million worth of personal assets to support the Ethereum Foundation during what he calls a “light belt-tightening” phase. These ETH were initially transferred between his Gnosis wallets, then 13,217 ETH were converted into wrapped ETH (wETH), equivalent to about $29 million.

Of these, approximately $2.3 million worth of ETH has been sold, while $500,000 was transferred to Kanro — a biotech company founded by Buterin in 2023. After recent transactions, his holdings decreased from around 241,000 ETH to 227,268 ETH, valued at approximately $498.5 million. ETH still makes up the majority of his total asset portfolio of over $532 million.

Previously, Buterin’s ETH holdings exceeded $1 billion in 2021 when he owned more than 333,000 ETH. He has also sold some ETH in the past, including an OTC sale of 500,000 ETH in 2015.

In related news, Buterin recently expressed skepticism about the current role of layer-2 networks, stating that their initial vision within the Ethereum ecosystem “no longer fits” and calling for a new approach that relies less on these scaling solutions.