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Ethereum news is making rounds again as the company’s co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, once again captured attention by selling free tokens in the form of memes for 22.14 ETH.
This is about $96,400 at the current market prices. As per on-chain data, it is another occasion on which Buterin has sold unsolicited meme tokens deposited to his address, which has been a common trend over the last 12 months.
The sale was made soon after the tokens had been transferred to his publicly known wallet, vitalik.eth, which supported the trend of Buterin dissociating himself with airdrops that were speculative.
Ethereum News: Recent STRK Unlock Adds to On-Chain Transparency Around Buterin’s Activity
This sale of memes comes right after another important wallet event, which is the arrival of native STRK tokens of Starknet. As an unlocked token grant, Butterin just got 6.29 million STRK tokens, worth approximately $1 million, as an award in the Starknet ecosystem. The tokens were moved to his Gnosis safe wallet and it was the second significant release within less than one year.
Buterin started working with Starknet in 2018 when he was included in the seed round of StarkWare. His initial backing and continued involvement have strengthened the connection between Ethereum Layer-1 network and the new Layer-2 systems based on zero-knowledge proofs.
Outside these wallets, Buterin has expressed strong opinions on the long-term future of Ethereum as a sustainable decentralized finance (DeFi). In his recent observations, he stressed that the future of Ethereum is so-called low-risk DeFi, a transformation of the current speculative trading into stable and secure financial services.
He also compared the maturing of DeFi to the development of the internet, claiming that the future of Ethereum could be seen as a transformation of how Google transformed into the undisputed use case of the web. Buterin claims that the payments, savings, and collateralized lending through the applications have become the core value proposition of Ethereum.
This perception depicts a remarkable shift in the strategic direction of Ethereum. Although previous market cycles were concerned with the unstable speculation in various tokens, the current attention is on the development of reliable infrastructure that can host billions of users.
The back message coincides with the general beliefs of Buterin, who consistently believed in pragmatic usefulness and decentralization, despite the rest of the crypto market going through booms and busts of speculative interest.
Ethereum News: Layer-2 Expansion and Institutional Confidence
The Layer-2 adoption is now rapidly increasing in the Ethereum ecosystem. Starknet, Arbitrum, and Optimism all process billions of dollars of total value locked (TVL), which is used to decrease mainnet congestion and transaction costs on Ethereum. Institutional-grade scaling solutions and revitalized activity of developers in Layer-2 frameworks favor structural change.
According to the data provided by DefiLlama, the TVL on Starknet has joined others, increasing steadily in Q3.
The fact that early backers, such as Buterin, continue to receive vested tokens also indicates that Starknet is transitioning from its early-stage development to wider implementation.
The on-chain data consistently used by Ethereum, such as stable gas usage and transaction volume, is an indication of a robust network during market fluctuations. With ETH price trading between major technical levels, interest in the fundamentals of the network has grown, and speculative price action has become less important.
