Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum

Hide table of contents
by EAHistorian
2 min read 4

64

Building effective altruismEffective givingDonation writeupGood things & impact storiesHistory of effective altruismVitalik Buterin
Frontpage

This may be the first in a sequence of posts sharing little-known interesting stories from the history of Effective Altruism.

In 2021, Effective Altruists played a role in encouraging Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, to liquidate and donate a substantial portion of his meme coin holdings, valued at billions, to high-impact causes such as COVID-19 relief efforts in India. Here's a chronological breakdown of the what worked and the individuals involved. I have no connection to any of the people involved.

🗓️ Late April to Early May 2021

  • Background: Vitalik Buterin had been gifted large quantities of meme tokens like SHIB and AKITA, totaling approximately $13 billion at their peak.
  • These tokens were sent by their creators to Vitalik's public wallet as a publicity stunt, assuming he would never cash them out.

🗓️ May 7-10, 2021

  • In an Effective Altruism (EA) Facebook group, Greg Colbourn noticed this massive holding and highlighted the high expected value (EV) of reaching out to Vitalik to suggest donating a portion.

  • Proposal by Greg Colbourn:

    "Looks pretty high EV to Tweet/otherwise contact him suggesting he cashes out ~ a billion dollars for EA causes."

  • Source Post Discussion Thread: EA Discussion Archive

🗓️ May 10-12, 2021

  • Luke Cockerham suggested avoiding public tweets to prevent market participants from anticipating a sell-off.

    "Tweeting him would be a poor way to get his attention without alerting other market participants that there might become a huge seller in the marketplace."

  • Contact Suggestions:
  • Giego Caleiro attempted to reach Vitalik's father. His interpretation was that the message would reach Vitalik indirectly despite his father’s non-committal response.

🗓️ May 12-13, 2021

  • Vitalik began liquidating significant portions of his meme coin holdings and donating the proceeds.
  • Breakdown of Donations (via Hudson Jameson on Twitter):
    • 13,292 ETH to GiveWell
    • 1,050 ETH to Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)
    • 500 ETH to Charter Cities Institute
    • $1 Billion in SHIB to CryptoRelief (COVID Relief Fund India)
  • Hudson Jameson's Summary on Twitter: Hudson Jameson Tweet

🗓️ May 13, 2021: Community Reactions and Reflection

  • William Eden: "This was the best possible use of a shitcoin airdrop. Vitalik absolutely rocks."
  • Ezra Malafaia: Praised members of the community for taking bold action.

  • Greg Colbourn:

    "I'm not sure if we can claim credit, but we might well have had some influence."

🗓️ Mid-May 2021

  • Following this success, EA-aligned charities prioritized setting up multi-signature Ethereum wallets to handle future donations more effectively.
  • ALLFED Wallet Example: Gnosis Safe Wallet for ERC-20 Donations

🗓️ May 14-20, 2021: Media Coverage Picks Up

  • Major media outlets began covering the story:
    • Vox Article: The World of Crypto Philanthropy is About to Get Weird
    • Celebrity Net Worth: Vitalik Buterin's $14 Billion Meme Coin Fortune

🗓️ Late May 2021: Reflecting on Success and Future Plans

  • Greg Colbourn: Emphasized the need for EA charities to maintain multisig ETH wallets for efficient handling of large-scale crypto donations.
  • CEEALAR Multisig Wallet Setup: CEEALAR Fundraising Page

64

1
3

Reactions

1
3

More posts like this

Comments4


Sorted by
New & upvoted
Click to highlight new comments since:
Rasool20
4
0

I agree with Greg that I'm not sure how causal that all was, as Vitalik says on the 80000 hours podcast:

Yeah. And when I got the Shiba tokens in 2021, I fully identified as EA then, and I was fully on board with defending the EAs against all of the various Twitter criticism. But at the same time, if you look at where I gave those donations, it was just a pretty broad spray across a bunch of things — the largest share of which basically had to do with global public health

(emphasis mine)

And as for the timing, in that same podcast episode he says:

What ended up happening was I was anticipating that these coins would just totally crash and burn, and they’d at most be able to cash out maybe $25 million. And I thought that, OK, there’s this very acute emergency situation in India, and they have to go and act quickly. And let’s act quickly, because if you act slowly, then, one, the COVID issue would… like, the opportunity to help would be gone — but also because that was in the middle of a crazy crypto bubble, and those coins could drop by 90% tomorrow. So I was definitely acting very hastily.

Reply
Jamie_Harris2
0
0
1

I appreciate the original post and also appreciate you highlighting this useful extra info.

Thanks to both!

Reply
Nathan Young2
2
2

I find it very funny that such a huge donation basically happened by accident. Surreal stuff.

Reply
guneyulasturker 🔸2
2
1

Great post. Would love to see more stories like this 

Reply
Curated and popular this week
LintzA
 ·  · 15m read
 · 
Cross-posted to Lesswrong Introduction Several developments over the past few months should cause you to re-evaluate what you are doing. These include: 1. Updates toward short timelines 2. The Trump presidency 3. The o1 (inference-time compute scaling) paradigm 4. Deepseek 5. Stargate/AI datacenter spending 6. Increased internal deployment 7. Absence of AI x-risk/safety considerations in mainstream AI discourse Taken together, these are enough to render many existing AI governance strategies obsolete (and probably some technical safety strategies too). There's a good chance we're entering crunch time and that should absolutely affect your theory of change and what you plan to work on. In this piece I try to give a quick summary of these developments and think through the broader implications these have for AI safety. At the end of the piece I give some quick initial thoughts on how these developments affect what safety-concerned folks should be prioritizing. These are early days and I expect many of my takes will shift, look forward to discussing in the comments!  Implications of recent developments Updates toward short timelines There’s general agreement that timelines are likely to be far shorter than most expected. Both Sam Altman and Dario Amodei have recently said they expect AGI within the next 3 years. Anecdotally, nearly everyone I know or have heard of who was expecting longer timelines has updated significantly toward short timelines (<5 years). E.g. Ajeya’s median estimate is that 99% of fully-remote jobs will be automatable in roughly 6-8 years, 5+ years earlier than her 2023 estimate. On a quick look, prediction markets seem to have shifted to short timelines (e.g. Metaculus[1] & Manifold appear to have roughly 2030 median timelines to AGI, though haven’t moved dramatically in recent months). We’ve consistently seen performance on benchmarks far exceed what most predicted. Most recently, Epoch was surprised to see OpenAI’s o3 model achi
Dr Kassim
 ·  · 4m read
 · 
Hey everyone, I’ve been going through the EA Introductory Program, and I have to admit some of these ideas make sense, but others leave me with more questions than answers. I’m trying to wrap my head around certain core EA principles, and the more I think about them, the more I wonder: Am I misunderstanding, or are there blind spots in EA’s approach? I’d really love to hear what others think. Maybe you can help me clarify some of my doubts. Or maybe you share the same reservations? Let’s talk. Cause Prioritization. Does It Ignore Political and Social Reality? EA focuses on doing the most good per dollar, which makes sense in theory. But does it hold up when you apply it to real world contexts especially in countries like Uganda? Take malaria prevention. It’s a top EA cause because it’s highly cost effective $5,000 can save a life through bed nets (GiveWell, 2023). But what happens when government corruption or instability disrupts these programs? The Global Fund scandal in Uganda saw $1.6 million in malaria aid mismanaged (Global Fund Audit Report, 2016). If money isn’t reaching the people it’s meant to help, is it really the best use of resources? And what about leadership changes? Policies shift unpredictably here. A national animal welfare initiative I supported lost momentum when political priorities changed. How does EA factor in these uncertainties when prioritizing causes? It feels like EA assumes a stable world where money always achieves the intended impact. But what if that’s not the world we live in? Long termism. A Luxury When the Present Is in Crisis? I get why long termists argue that future people matter. But should we really prioritize them over people suffering today? Long termism tells us that existential risks like AI could wipe out trillions of future lives. But in Uganda, we’re losing lives now—1,500+ die from rabies annually (WHO, 2021), and 41% of children suffer from stunting due to malnutrition (UNICEF, 2022). These are preventable d
 ·  · 9m read
 · 
TL;DR In a sentence:  We are shifting our strategic focus to put our proactive effort towards helping people work on safely navigating the transition to a world with AGI, while keeping our existing content up. In more detail: We think it’s plausible that frontier AI companies will develop AGI by 2030. Given the significant risks involved, and the fairly limited amount of work that’s been done to reduce these risks, 80,000 Hours is adopting a new strategic approach to focus our efforts in this area.   During 2025, we are prioritising: 1. Deepening our understanding as an organisation of how to improve the chances that the development of AI goes well 2. Communicating why and how people can contribute to reducing the risks 3. Connecting our users with impactful roles in this field 4. And fostering an internal culture which helps us to achieve these goals We remain focused on impactful careers, and we plan to keep our existing written and audio content accessible to users. However, we are narrowing our focus as we think that most of the very best ways to have impact with one’s career now involve helping make the transition to a world with AGI go well.   This post goes into more detail on why we’ve updated our strategic direction, how we hope to achieve it, what we think the community implications might be, and answers some potential questions. Why we’re updating our strategic direction Since 2016, we've ranked ‘risks from artificial intelligence’ as our top pressing problem. Whilst we’ve provided research and support on how to work on reducing AI risks since that point (and before!), we’ve put in varying amounts of investment over time and between programmes. We think we should consolidate our effort and focus because:   * We think that AGI by 2030 is plausible — and this is much sooner than most of us would have predicted 5 years ago. This is far from guaranteed, but we think the view is compelling based on analysis of the current flow of inputs into AI
Recent opportunities in Building effective altruism
36
Meta Charity Funders: 2025 Spring round. Apply now!
Joey🔸
· · 2m read
0
0
99
Vote for videos about EA charities! (Project for Awesome 2025)
EA_ProjectForAwesome
· · 2m read
6
6
20
The Humane League is hiring a Director of Philanthropy
Caroline Mills
· · 2m read
0
0
View more