Ethereum Creator Vitalik Buterin Starts April Fools' Day With Major Meme Coin Cleanup

With the start of a new month, the activity of wallets belonging to Vitalik Buterin has once again attracted attention from the crypto community, amid a market recovery, particularly with Ethereum gaining nearly 8% since the beginning of the week.

Buterin continues to execute a strategy of offloading gifted meme coins and reallocating funds toward infrastructure and, apparently, charitable initiatives. According to Onchain Lens, which cites Arkham data, several such transactions have been recorded in recent hours.

Specifically, Buterin sold another batch of unknown low-cap meme coins sent to him, receiving about 14.5 $ETH, which is just over $30,000 at the current rate.

Is new meme purge starting?

Buterin's position here is clear, as he has repeatedly stated that he does not want to receive such tokens as gifts and urges developers to direct them to charity. Historically, he either "burns" these coins or sells them to fund ecosystem development and charitable causes, as seen when he donated $1 billion worth of Shiba Inu ($SHIB) back in 2021.

This is why the context of $SHIB resurfaced in today’s transactions. Buterin recently criticized how his previous donation in this token, ultimately valued at $500 million, was used by the Future of Life Institute to lobby politicians for AI.

At the same time, Buterin continues to actively use privacy tools. In particular, he transferred 70,000 $USDC and 44 $ETH, totaling $92,000, into the Railgun protocol. Buterin has long advocated that privacy is a fundamental human baseline, making Railgun, built on ZK-SNARKs, a suitable tool for protecting transactions from excessive public monitoring.

The last time Buterin sold Ethereum was at the end of February 2026, when he offloaded 17,696 $ETH worth $35 million. Whether today’s activity signals a similar move for April remains unlikely for now, as the nature of these transactions differs.