Vitalik trims ETH holdings amid market downturn

Wallets labeled as belonging to Buterin by on-chain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence show routine swaps over recent days totaling more than 3,100 ETH—worth over $6.1 million—executed via the decentralized exchange CoW Swap, Decrypt reported.

Separately, other on-chain tracking cited in market reporting put the cumulative February sales higher. A report published Feb. 24 that referenced analytics platform Onchain Lens said Buterin sold 10,723 ETH for about $21.74 million, averaging roughly $2,027 per ETH.

The sales follow a late-January disclosure in which Buterin said he had set aside 16,384 ETH from his personal holdings to support privacy-preserving technologies, open hardware, and “secure, verifiable software systems,” with deployment planned over several years rather than immediately.

In that statement, Buterin framed the funding as part of a broader shift as the Ethereum Foundation entered a period of “mild austerity” while maintaining its core technical roadmap. He also said he would take on work that might otherwise be handled as special projects, describing a goal of building an “open-source, secure and verifiable full stack” of software and hardware for self-sovereign tools.

Decrypt reported that Buterin’s latest sales brought his on-chain Ethereum holdings to just over 224,000 ETH, valued at about $426 million at the time of publication.

The timing has drawn attention because it coincides with a sharp pullback in ETH. Decrypt said ETH was down about 4% over 24 hours during the latest reported sales and had fallen below $1,900, extending a steep monthly decline. 

Trading-focused coverage of Buterin’s January earmark noted that he did not provide a project-by-project allocation plan for the 16,384 ETH, but described the funds as intended for long-term deployment and potentially supplemented via decentralized staking strategies designed to generate additional funding from staking rewards.

The recent transactions were carried out through decentralized venues rather than direct centralized exchange sales, according to the on-chain descriptions in both Decrypt’s reporting and the market write-up citing Onchain Lens. Decrypt specifically described “swapping” ETH for stablecoins via CoW Swap and said the activity had been recurring in multiple transactions.

Buterin has previously tied planned ETH sales to funding needs rather than personal liquidation. In Decrypt’s account, the February activity follows an earlier transfer of more than $29 million worth of ETH, with at least $2.3 million sold to help fund Ethereum Foundation initiatives as it prepared for tighter budgeting.