V God sold half of his Bitcoin in 2013 due to concerns about zero

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin was forced to sell half of his personal Bitcoin in 2013 to avoid bankruptcy due to the Bitcoin price going to zero, according to a tweet from Buterin today.

Vitalik Buterin is one of the most well-known figures in the crypto industry. In addition to co-founding Ethereum, Buterin also co-founded Bitcoin Magazine. A few years ago, Vitalik publicly commented on his personal wealth, saying that he receives 137,000 Swiss francs ($154,000) per year from the Ethereum Foundation. More recently, it has been estimated that his net worth is around $100-200 million. However, success did not come easily for the brains behind Ethereum.

Vitalik said: “Seven years ago, Ethereum had not yet started and my net worth was only a few thousand dollars. But at that time, I sold half of all my Bitcoins to ensure that I would not go bankrupt when Bitcoin returned to zero.”

This tweet comes on the heels of Vitalik’s investment advice, “Never take out a personal loan to buy ETH or other Ethereum assets.” This was said because podcast host Peter McCormack (who is being sued for defamation by CoinGeek chief scientist Craig Wright) tweeted that Vitalik took out a loan to buy Bitcoin. McCormack slyly replied that he also does not recommend taking out a loan to buy Ethereum.

How much cryptocurrency does Vitalik have?

The latest revelations on Reddit provide some insight into Vitalik Buterin’s current personal cryptocurrency wealth.

His main Ethereum address contains about 333,348 ETH ($195 million). However, he previously used another address (which contained about 430 ETH ($252,000)) to donate a 1,000 ETH development grant, calling it "YOLO" at the time.

His personal crypto holdings include Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a few others, according to an archived Reddit post from a year ago.

These include BCH, DOGE, and ZEC. In addition, Buterin’s “non-Ethereum ecosystem tokens” include KNC, MKR, OMG, REP.

The Ethereum co-founder also disclosed “significant corporate stakes” in Clearmatics and Starkware.

Clearmatics is a London-based blockchain company that builds a distributed network platform owned and governed by its members, while Israel-based Starkware aims to solve what it describes as two of the “most pressing problems of permissionless blockchains”: scalability and privacy.

However, if Vitalik had given up Ethereum to work for Google, all of this might have ended prematurely.