Vitalik Buterin Snagged $4.3 Million From Dogecoin Investment, Courtesy of Elon Musk

Russian-Canadian programmer Vitalik Buterin, who co-founded Ethereum in 2013 at the young age of 19, became the world’s youngest crypto billionaire at age 27 last month.

Buterin also made over $4 million from the recent spike in the price of Dogecoin following Elon Musk’s tweets and SNL appearance. The founder of Ethereum (ETH) revealed that he invested $25,000 in the meme token Dogecoin in 2016, and sold half of his holdings last May, making a total of $4.3 million which was donated to GiveDirectly, a non-profit organization.

A phenomenon the crypto space is tagging the “Musk Effect” which began in January when Elon Musk changed his Twitter description to *Bitcoin” and saw the price of bitcoin peak at over 18% of its price 7 hours later, as well as his one-word tweet promoting Dogecoin which increased the price of the meme token over 100%, has illustrated the significant impact Elon Musk’s Twitter activity had on cryptocurrency markets.

Vitalik Buterin who also co-founded Bitcoin Magazine first proposed Ethereum in a white paper in 2013. In 2014 the project was crowdfunded and went live in July 2015. Buterin argued that Bitcoin and blockchain technology could benefit from other applications besides money and needed a scripting language for application development that could lead to attaching real-world assets, such as stocks and property, to the blockchain.

Ethereum has grown to be the second-biggest cryptocurrency by market value, a bit less than half the market capitalization of Bitcoin. As of now, Buterin holds about 333,500 ether in his public wallet, and became the youngest known crypto billionaire at age 27 in May, when Ethereum traded at about $3,500.

Ethereum is currently trading at about $2,400, down 2.4% in the last 24 hours and close to 50% less than its May $4,300 all-time high, with analysts predicting the price will move above the $5,000 mark in 2022.

 

ETHUSD Chart By TradingView

With the coming launch of Ethereum 2.0, also known as Eth2 or “Serenity”, an upgrade to the Ethereum blockchain that aims to enhance the speed, efficiency, and scalability of the Ethereum network so that it can process more transactions and ease bottlenecks with the way transactions are verified and fees are charged, some observers expect the ETH price to rebound and advance to fresh highs.

In the meantime, a major spike in Ethereum’s price value may be recorded as preparation for EIP-1559 —which is scheduled to commence in July— kicks off.