Vitalik Buterin's Wallets Shed About 17,000 ETH via CoW Protocol

Vitalik Buterin reduced his attributed ether holdings in February, with wallet balances falling from about 241,000 ETH at the start of the month to 224,000 ETH by late month through sales routed via decentralized exchange aggregator CoW Protocol, Arkham Intelligence data show. The outflows occurred steadily throughout the period, including $6.6 million over three days in early February and roughly $7 million in the past three days, executed as numerous smaller swaps rather than single large transactions. Ether has fallen 37% over the past month and traded near $1,900 on Wednesday, according to CoinDesk market data, while more than 30% of ETH supply remains locked in staking with yields around 2.8%. In January, Buterin said he had set aside 16,384 ETH, about $43 million, to support privacy-preserving technologies, open hardware and secure software systems, with the capital to be deployed gradually over several years; the subsequent decline in holdings is roughly in line with that amount.