Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has proven that he is a mere mortal after all. We can see from his Twitter username that Vitalik owns the ENS domain, Vitalik.eth. However, that means that we can look up this address on Etherscan to see the details of his recent transactions. The ENS address, which he has registered until 2032, resolves to the Ethereum wallet 0xd8dA6BF26964aF9D7eEd9e03E53415D37aA96045 and has a current balance of just over $5 million. Here, we discover why he may be about to lose his god-like status.
gm!
Here is a picture of a beautiful field full of flowers. pic.twitter.com/JF5qyumLNU
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) March 15, 2022
Vitalik is just like us.
First noticed by Reddit user u/UnexperiencedIT, it seems that Vitalik follows the same protocol many of us do in private. As much as we outwardly profess our love of crypto and how superior it is to fiat currency, we all do the same thing in the privacy of our wallets. We send a test transaction before sending the total amount. Moving your Ethereum balance from hot wallet to cold storage? “Better send 0.01 ETH first and begrudge that the transaction fees are almost greater than the actual amount!”
Today, we can exclusively reveal (through publically accessible blockchain ledgers, of course!) that Vitalik’s go-to test amount is 0.1 ETH. It seems the first time he interacts with any new address, it is standard practice. After that, as the image below shows, he is happy to send millions of dollars worth of crypto without a test transaction. So perhaps the man is no mortal after all.
He does the same thing with one of his other known wallets.
So there you have it, the next time you are flippantly about to send your monthly salary in ShibaElonSwapDoge to your cold wallet for safekeeping, remember this; even the grandfather of Ethereum sends a test transaction first. A little tip for those who like to live life on the edge regarding crypto transactions. If you use your mobile device to transfer tokens and the copy and paste function from your wallet, make sure you pay attention to the little pop-up that appears when you paste the address into your final location. Last year, developers added this feature on Android and iOS after a vulnerability in Apple’s clipboard feature. The popup will let you know that the data you are pasting has not been compromised and has come from the source you intended. Of course, you should always check the address manually, but it’s a nice feature to reduce your anxiety.
The transparency of crypto
As fun as it is to know that Vitalik has the same habits as everyone else when it comes to crypto, it does also shine a light on the beauty of crypto from another perspective. Whilst researching this piece, I dug into specific transactions in his wallet. One of the addresses where he’d sent a test transaction was labeled as Gitcoin, a web3 “community of builders, creators, and protocols”. This allows us to extrapolate how Vitalik is helping support the growth of web3 outside of simply the Ethereum ecosystem. Granted, a simple Google search could tell us this but blockchain allows us to see this information first hand in real-time. That level of transparency is something we, as human beings, are just not used to. I don’t know about you, but the little things like that make me so excited for the future of web3 and where we are going to end up.
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