Vitalik Buterin transfers $1.05M in ETH to crypto mixer Railgun

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has moved 400 ETH, worth about $1.05 million, to Railgun, a well-known crypto mixer, according to on-chain data from the Arkham Intelligence dashboard.

The transaction, which took place on Aug. 19, was corroborated by Web3 analysis platform SpotOnChain, which stated that Buterin had transferred 662 ETH, approximately $1.91 million, to Railgun in the last ten months.

Railgun

Railgun functions like the sanctioned Tornado Cash protocol by helping to obfuscate its users’ transactions. However, it employs the Privacy Pool protocol, a concept from an academic paper by Buterin.

The Privacy Pools allow users to create cryptographic proofs verifying their funds’ legitimate origins while maintaining privacy. So, if honest users generate these proofs, only bad actors such as the North Korea-backed hackers Lazarus Group will lack them, and this differentiation could help law enforcement identify and exclude these illicit participants.

Buterin said:

“Railgun uses the privacy pools protocol which makes it much harder for bad actors to join the pool without compromising users’ privacy.”

Thanks to Buterin’s continued usage, Railgun’s popularity has surged. It now boasts nearly 10,000 unique users on the Ethereum blockchain, and it has processed a total of $1.6 billion in transactions, according to the Dune Analytics dashboard.

Another donation?

The specific reason behind Buterin’s recent transfer remains unclear. However, some community members speculate it could be linked to charitable donations.

Indeed, Buterin has a history of significant crypto donations. In 2021, he contributed over $1 billion in the Shiba Inu memecoin to the Indian Covid-Crypto Relief Fund.

More recently, he donated 200 ETH, valued at over $500,000, to an Animal Welfare Charity fund. Buterin stated that these funds were generated from selling various animal-themed tokens while urging the coin issuers to allocate them to charities directly in the future.

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