Title: Vitalik Buterin’s Investments in Cryptocurrency Projects: A Detailed Overview
As a leader in the crypto industry, Vitalik Buterin has always been active at the forefront of the industry. Besides being widely recognized as the founder of Ethereum, Vitalik has also invested in several new crypto projects under his personal capacity. On June 28th, the layer 2 project MegaETH, aiming to create a high-performance real-time EVM, announced a $20 million funding round, with Vitalik appearing on the list as an investor. PANews took stock of the crypto projects Vitalik has invested in and examined how his track record as an investor has fared.
Publicly available information shows that Vitalik has invested in a total of 7 crypto projects to date. Among them are well-known projects like StarkNet and Polymarket, as well as underperforming ones like Nocturne, which announced the cessation of operations in June this year.
StarkNet: Highest ROI of 146x
StarkNet, an permissionless decentralized Validity-Rollup (also known as “ZK-Rollup”), operates as an L2 network on Ethereum. Vitalik made a seed round investment in StarkNet in May 2018, with a total funding amount of $6 million. The percentage of Vitalik’s ownership in the seed round hasn’t been publicly disclosed. According to Chainbroker’s data, the token cost for StarkNet’s seed round investment was $0.025, and the STRK token reached a peak price of $3.66. Vitalik’s investment in StarkNet saw a return rate of 146x at its peak, with the current STRK price at $0.675, still providing a return of 27x compared to Vitalik’s cost.
Apart from financial support, Vitalik has also publicly expressed support for StarkNet on social media.
As of now, StarkNet has raised a total of $260 million in funding. The most recent funding round was in May 2022, where it secured $100 million at a valuation of $8 billion.
In February 2024, StarkNet completed its first airdrop and token launch. In May, Vitalik unlocked 845,205 STRK tokens from StarkNet, valued at $1.08 million. Currently, Vitalik has not sold any STRK tokens.
Aztec Network: A $100 million funding with no significant impact
Aztec Network is
