Vitalik Buterin withdrew 3,500 ETH worth $6.95M from Aave on Feb 22, resuming ETH sales after a two-week pause. Here’s what the data shows.
Vitalik Buterin is selling again. On-chain tracking account @lookonchain on X flagged the move on February 22, reporting that vitalik.eth pulled 3,500 ETH, worth roughly $6.95 million, out of Aave. Within eight hours, he had already offloaded 571 ETH, or about $1.13 million of that batch.
This wasn’t an isolated action. It came after a two-week pause in selling, according to the same lookonchain post. The market had barely settled from the last wave before another round hit the tape.
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Go back three weeks. Lookonchain reported on X that between February 2 and February 5, Buterin offloaded 6,183 ETH at an average price of $2,140. Total take: $13.24 million. That was the period ETH broke below $2,000, and the selling, the post noted, picked up speed as the price fell.
His Etherscan address shows a consistent outflow pattern across weeks.
The total between both rounds runs well past $20 million in ETH sold. One X user, @dom_kwok, responding to Buterin’s January 30 post, put it bluntly: “nice way to say you dumped $40,000,000 of $ETH.” That comment referred to a separate withdrawal of 16,384 ETH Buterin announced at the time.
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On January 30, Buterin posted on X explaining why he withdrew 16,384 ETH. He tied it to the Ethereum Foundation, entering what he called “a period of mild austerity,” balancing an aggressive technical roadmap while preserving the Foundation’s long-term financial health.
He said the funds would go toward projects involving open-source software, privacy tools, secure hardware, encrypted messaging, biotech, and what he described as a “full-stack openness and verifiability” vision. He named his own share of this austerity plainly: taking on responsibilities that, in his words, would have been “special projects” in another time.
The 16,384 ETH, he posted, would be deployed across these goals over several years. He mentioned exploring decentralized staking options to put staking rewards toward the same mission long-term.
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ETH sat below $2,000 during the heaviest selling in early February. The February 22 withdrawal came as prices remained under pressure, and institutional Ethereum ETF flows had already stalled close to zero, per recent fund data.
Not exactly ideal timing for confidence. Still, Buterin’s public explanation ties the selling to planned deployments, not distress.
@lookonchain’s February 22 post on X tracked the Aave withdrawal through Arkham Intelligence data, which continues to monitor his wallet movements in real time. The 571 ETH already sold from that batch is just the start of what could be a multi-week deployment.
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Buterin’s stated rationale is detailed and specific. Privacy infrastructure, open silicon, local-first software, biotech. Whether the market reads these withdrawals as foundation funding or founder offloading depends heavily on who’s watching.
The on-chain record doesn’t lie. Millions moved, prices still soft, and the selling resumed on schedule after a two-week break.
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