Vitalik Buterin sends $1.05 million worth of ETH to cryptocurrency mixer Railgun

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has moved 400 ETH, worth roughly $1.05 million, to popular cryptocurrency mixer Railgun, according to on-chain data from the Arcam Intelligence Dashboard.

The transaction, which took place on Aug. 19 and was confirmed by Web3 analytics platform SpotOnChain, stated that Buterin had transferred 662 ETH (approximately $1.91 million) to Railgun over the past 10 months.

Railgun

Railgun works similarly to the permissioned Tornado Cash protocol by obfuscating users' transactions, but employs the Privacy Pool protocol, a concept from Buterin's academic paper.

Privacy pools allow users to create cryptographic proofs that attest to the legitimate origin of their funds while maintaining privacy. Thus, if honest users generate these proofs, only bad actors, such as North Korea-backed hackers Lazarus Group, will lack the proofs, and this distinction allows law enforcement to identify and remove these illicit participants.

Buterin said:

“Railgun uses a privacy pool protocol, making it extremely difficult for malicious users to join a pool without violating users' privacy.”

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

Another donation?

The specific reason for Buterin's latest transfer is unclear, but some members of the community speculate that it may have something to do with charitable donations.

Indeed, Buterin has a history of making significant crypto donations: in 2021, he donated over $1 billion in Shiba Inu meme coins to the India COVID-19 Crypto Relief Fund.

More recently, he donated 200 ETH, valued at more than $500,000, to an animal welfare charity fund. Buterin said these funds came from the sale of various animal-themed tokens, and urged coin issuers to allocate them directly to charities in the future.

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