Here's an interesting story recently revealed by Vitalik Buterin. It turns out that a meme coin once transformed into a charitable foundation worth about a billion dollars. Sounds like a joke, but it really happened.

It all started in 2021, when Shiba Inu creators unsolicitedly sent a huge amount of SHIB to Buterin's address. The plan was simple — to use his name in marketing and become the next Dogecoin. The value soared above a billion. Vitalik Buterin decided to urgently get rid of this baggage, even had to call his stepmother in Canada to get her to fetch the private key from his closet.

He sold what he could for ETH, donated 50 million to GiveWell, and split the rest evenly. One half went to CryptoRelief to help India, the other to the Future of Life Institute, an organization focused on AI risks. FLI expected to receive a maximum of 25 million but managed to liquidate about 500 million. That’s how a meme coin funded a serious charitable project.

But here’s the catch. Vitalik Buterin recently stated that FLI has taken a sharp turn. Instead of a comprehensive approach to existential risks, the organization has focused on aggressive political campaigns on AI issues. He worries that large-scale coordinated actions with such financial pools easily lead to unforeseen consequences and authoritarian decisions.

He pointed to biosecurity as an example. FLI wants to embed restrictions into AI models so they refuse to generate dangerous outcomes. But Vitalik Buterin considers this a fragile approach — jailbreaks and workarounds make such restrictions useless. The logical end? Banning open-source code and supporting a single well-intentioned company for global dominance. Sounds like a path toward concentrated power.

Another problem: when governments restrict technologies, national security agencies get exemptions. And they often themselves are sources of risk. Buterin cited examples of government programs with leaks from laboratories.

However, Vitalik Buterin acknowledged that recent FLI initiatives inspired him. For example, the cross-ideological declaration for humans and AI united conservatives, progressives, and libertarians. But the main message is clear: a donation he never planned to make funded an organization that has diverged from his beliefs and now spends hundreds of millions in ways he disapproves of.

This is a classic example of how good intentions can lead to unintended consequences on a large scale.