Compass Investments

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has reduced his Ether coin balance by about 17,000 ETH over the past month after announcing his intention to allocate $45 million in tokens to support privacy projects.

At the beginning of February, Buterin’s electronic accounts tracked by Arkham held about 241,000 Ether (ETH), but by Tuesday a series of outflows had reduced the total to 224,000 ETH.

That decline came amid continued sales by Buterin, including the sale of some 2,961 Ether equivalent to $6.6 million in three days earlier this month. Onchain noted that the pace of these transactions has recently picked up, with him disposing of $7 million worth of tokens in the past three days.

Information from Arkham Intelligence indicates that ETH was sold through the CoW Protocol decentralized exchange (DEX) aggregator, using multiple small exchanges instead of a single large transaction – a method often used to minimize market impact.

The growing sale of ETH follows Buterin’s announcement in January that he would allocate 16,384 Ether (about $45 million) of his personal funds to finance developments in privacy, open source hardware, and secure, auditable software systems. He said the funds will be phased in over the next few years as part of a broader campaign to promote open source tools and self-sufficiency.

Buterin correlated the effort with the Ethereum Foundation’s transition into the “lean phase, while keeping its technical development plan relevant. He added that he will personally take on endeavors that might otherwise be handed over to the foundation, focusing on building a full suite of open source solutions (both software and hardware) to protect both the digital and physical worlds.

In particular, he emphasized:

{“Our goal is to have an affordable, secure and verifiable complete hardware and software suite capable of protecting both our privacy and the social fabric.

Buterin’s sale of his ETH holdings coincided with a significant drop in the price of Ether, which, according to CoinMarketCap, has lost more than 37% of its value over the past month. At the time of writing, the token was trading at $1,825.39, having fallen by almost 5% over the past 24 hours.

the weak price dynamics is observed against the background of the fact that more than 30% of the total supply of Ether remains blocked in the mechanism of staking. Despite the fact that the staking yield percentage has dropped to around 2.8% , demand for validators remains high, the queue for connections is close to record levels, and withdrawal volumes are minimal, according to DropsTab.