cryptoknowmics.com
|
|
Ethereum Co-Founder, Vitalik Buterin recently appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast, during which he revealed that he had earned over $4 million on his initial investment of $25,000 in Dogecoin.
Dogecoin was created in 2013 after a Shiba Inu-inspired meme began to trend on social media.
Vitalik recounts that DOGE was one of the first “fun coins” on the market and that his investment was fairly uninformed.
Vitalik Buterin Thinks Investment in Dogecoin was the Best Decision
Back in 2016, Vitalik was prompted to invest in DOGE by the community that had formed around it. While discussing his journey with the meme currency on the podcast, he joked that “people didn’t take it very seriously.” He stated:
“I just remembered thinking to myself, how am I going to explain to my mum that I just invested $25,000 into Dogecoin. What even are dog coins. Like the only interesting thing about this coin is a logo of a dog somewhere. But of course, that ended up being one of the best investments I have ever made.”
Vitalik admitted that he was caught off-guard when Elon Musk’s fascination with the meme-coin led to a market rally. “At the end of 2020, Elon Musk started talking about Dogecoin, and the market cap just shot up to $50 billion. It shot up multiple times,” remarked Buterin.
When DOGE prices started shooting upwards, Buterin, who was stuck in a lockdown in Singapore dropped everything and rushed to sell half of his share of the currency. He made $4.3 million from sales, which he donated to the charity GiveDirectly.
Buterin Did Not Expect Mainstream Success for DOGE
Vitalik remembers that he felt like “an amazing trader” after he sold half of his entire stock of Dogecoin. But the price, which plummeted from $0.07 back to its original level of $0.04, jumped even higher to $0.50.
If Buterin still owns 50% of his remaining share of DOGE, the Ethereum co-creator might be sitting on $20 million worth of assets in the digital currency.
Dogecoin is still under early development, but Buterin did not anticipate the success the dog token has managed to attain so far. He explains:
“DOGE becoming this big phenomenon, where there’s even a lot of people that have heard of DOGE that have not heard of Ethereum, is something that even I was not predicting.”