Vitalik Buterin earmarked 17,000 ether, worth about $43 million, for privacy projects in January. A month later, his wallet balance was down by roughly that amount, and the tokens he sold had lost more than a third of their value.
Arkham Intelligence data shows that at the beginning of February, the wallet belonging to Buterin held approximately 241,000 ETH. This number currently stands at 224,000 ETH after a series of steady outflows this month, including $6.6 million in the first three days of February and approximately $7 million more in the past three days alone.
The sale was executed through decentralized exchange aggregator CoW Protocol and was divided into multiple smaller swaps rather than a single large transaction.
This approach is standard practice for minimizing slippage on scale, but it also means the sell-off is a slow, ongoing drain rather than a one-time event.
The timing is uncomfortable. Ethereum has fallen 37% in the past month and was trading near $1,900 on Wednesday, according to CoinDesk market data, while Buterin’s continued sell-off added overall pressure to the already struggling coin.
Over 30% of the ETH supply is still locked, but yields have compressed to around 2.8%, making locking less attractive relative to risk-free alternatives.
Buterin announced the $43 million in grants in January, saying he had set aside 16,384 ETH to fund privacy-preserving technology, open hardware, and secure software systems.
He described the effort, which he will personally lead as the Ethereum Foundation enters a period of “mild retrenchment” while maintaining its technical roadmap. Funds will be deployed gradually over several years, he said.
Ethereum’s sell-off adds to the pain for enterprise Ethereum holders. Bitmine Immersion Technologies is one of the largest companies to take an estimated billions of dollars in unrealized losses after Ethereum dropped about 60% in six months, well below its average purchase price.