Vitalik Buterin sends $500K in ETH to support dev amid Ether price pump

Vitalik Buterin, Ethereum’s co-founder, was caught on the chain moving funds while Ether rides on a minor recovery rally. Data reveals that Vitalik donated 274 ETH to Isla, a Web3 researcher working on Zuitzerland.

This comes in when Ethereum recorded an almost 5% surge in the last 24 hours after battling with the increased selling pressure. The global crypto market printed green indexes all around on Tuesday morning. The cumulative digital assets market cap surged by 3% over the last day to stand at $2.73 trillion. However, the fear and greed index still suggests that the “Fear” sentiment is prevailing among the investors.

Vitalik’s $500K ETH donation

As per the data shared by SpotOnChain, Buterin sent 500K worth of Ethereum as a donation or grant to a multi sig deployed by Isla. The recipient is a researcher developing Zuitzerland a project inspired by Vitalik’s Zuzalu experiment. Back in 2023, Zuzalu, a funded project initiated by Vitalik Buterin gathered tech enthusiasts, longevity researchers, and decentralized governance in Montenegro. Zuitzerland has taken some notes from this. 

This is no big surprise that Buterin is always been a big supporter of decentralized, community-driven projects. Data shows that he sent 250 ETH (approx. worth $456K) to the privacy protocol Railgun, 5 days ago. This move is most likely to be taken for donation purposes, as he had frequently claimed.

But here’s the kicker, Vitalik sold 5,000 Dohrnii tokens for $93k minutes before transferring the 274 ETH. It came right after he sold 2 trillion LEDOG tokens for $16.5k. It turns out to be a quick liquid swap before the donation.

Vitalik Buterin (@VitalikButerin) just sent 274.1 $ETH ($500K) as a donation or grant to a multisig deployed by @0xisla, the developer behind @zuitzerland.

5 days ago, he also sent 250 $ETH ($456K) to the privacy protocol #Railgun, most likely for donation purposes, as he had… pic.twitter.com/I73oUp8xXW

— Spot On Chain (@spotonchain) April 1, 2025

The Ethereum founder has received these tokens as donations from Dohrnii Labs (10,000 DHN) and LEDOG founders (10 trillion DOG) in late 2024 and early 2025. It looks like he is been offloading them in batches since October. Meanwhile, Buterin is still holding around 2 trillion DOG tokens and has been slowly liquidating for other purposes.

Are ETH bulls back?

After a long running decline, Ether price finally saw a recovery rally as Bitcoin tried to regain the $85K mark. ETH price has dropped by 43% in the last quarter depicting low investor interest in the crypto. Ethereum is trading at an average price of $1,883 but it is still down by a massive 61% from its all time high of $4,891, recorded on November 16, 2021.

Data shared by CoinGlass shows that more than $61 million worth of long and short bets set on Ethereum price got liquidated over the last 24 hours. Around $37.7 million worth of liquidated bets (61%) turns out to be short positions. This suggests that traders were hoping ETH price to decline but it made a green comeback.

Finally, US ETH spot ETFs recorded 2 days of back to back inflow after a very long halt. ETH spot ETFs posted $6.41 million of inflow on March 31. Fidelity ETF FETH single handedly registered the largest net inflow in a single day of $6.4 million. The total net inflow of FETH reached $1.414 billion now.

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