Vitalik Buterin has recounted how he turned $25,000 into $4.3 million in three years by investing in DOGE in his recent appearance on the Lex Fridman Podcast.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin revealed he profited more than $4 million from a $25,000 investment that he made into Dogecoin (DOGE) during 2016 but he gave it all away to charity.
Originally created as a joke in December 2013, Dogecoin has risen 130-fold this year, peak market capitalization at $80 billion worth more than the GDP of 120 different countries with many of the recent price pumps attributed to Tesla and SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk series of cheerleading tweets.
“At the beginning, people didn’t take it very seriously […] I just remembered thinking to myself, ‘how am I going to explain to my mum that I just invested $25,000 into Dogecoin?’ […] like, the only interesting thing about this coin is a logo of a dog somewhere. But of course, that was one of the best investments I have ever made.”
Although Buterin stated that DOGE “did really well” over the following years, he recalled being caught off-guard by the speculative frenzy that resulted from Elon Musk’s fascination with the meme-coin.
“At the end of 2020, Elon Musk started talking about Dogecoin, and the market cap just shot up to $50 billion […] It shot up multiple times,” said Buterin.
“I immediately called up some of my friends and told them to drop everything and scramble, and I sold half of the DOGE, and I got $4.3 million, donated the profits to GiveDirectly, and a few hours after I did this, the price dropped back from around $0.07 to $0.04.”
Buterin described DOGE as among the first “fun coins” launched into the burgeoning crypto asset ecosystem.