Arkham Intelligence’s new Deep-Dive will be shared via X on September 6th, with Pegs Vitalik Buterin’s wealth being “at least $1.05 billion.” The report positions estimates as of August 2025, highlighting the price of ether changes during the day.
How rich is Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum?
The backbone is the ether itself. Arkham notes that ~240,042 ETH is attributable to Buterin’s known wallet, and that over 99% of the value of his crypto portfolio is in ETH. At the time of writing in the report, ETH is $4,321, accounting for the close joint movement between net worth and the market cycle of ETH with just about $1.04 billion.
Historically, Arkham reconstructs an accurate balance history curve. On December 31, 2015, Buterin’s known Crypto Wealth was $596,760. By December 31, 2016, it had reached $4.23 million, and a year later it had reached $278.37 million. This was the biggest jump from the 2017 Bull Run, year-over-year.
He first surpassed the on-chain billionaire mark at age 27 in 2021 as ETH exceeded $3,000 in 2021, and on November 18, 2021, ETH approached the cycle at $2.09 billion. The subsequent rebounds between 2024 and 2025 saw an approximately 75% decrease from $1.2 billion (December 31, 2021) (December 31, 2021) to $305.8 million (December 31, 2022).
“The peak of Vitalik’s Crypto net worth was in May 2021, with 50% of Memecoin Shib’s supply being sent to him, and a temporary $20 billion worth of value. Vitalik donated those tokens to charities and did not profit from this memocoin,” writes Arkham.
Regarding ownership concentration, Arkham compares butaline with other top tier ETH holders. The ETH2 (Beacon) deposit contract is led at 66,887,347.41 ETH, followed by Exchange and ETF-Custody clusters (Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, Robinhood, Grayscale, Blackrock). Arkham concludes that Butaline is the largest identifiable individual with access to the coin, but Estonian banker Rain Remus sits at around 250,000 ETHs, which are believed to be inaccessible due to the loss of keys.
The Ethereum co-founder’s own disclosures fix the percentage. In October 2018 he wrote: “I didn’t have a 900K ETH. When there was 0.9% of all ETH, the supply was 75 million.” That statement frames Arkham’s findings that his share never significantly exceeded ~0.9%, sold or donated and fell over time as supply evolved.
Positions other than ETH are small in dollar terms, but are spelled out with accurate counts. At the time of publication, Arkham shows 10,000,000,000 white (~$372 million), 30,000,000,000 Moodeng (~$690,000), and 869,509 KNC (~$327,000) among his larger non-ETH tokens. The long tail includes a $12,400 torn linked to tornado cash usage and 218,413,000 shiv (~$2,720) remaining at known addresses.
Buterin publicly explains some of the flows that complicate “selling.” In August 2022, he said, “I will give myself out as someone who used (tornado cash) to donate to this exact cause,” referring to the donation to Ukraine. He also states that since 2018, transfers bound to exchanges from his wallet are for donations rather than personal benefits.
Off-chain, Arkham highlighted the early fairness of zero-knowledge company Starkware, reaching a $8 billion valuation in the 2022 Series D. With no exact sizing of these stakes revealed, Arkham treats $1.05 billion as a conservative baseline rather than a cap.
At the time of pressing, Ethereum traded for $4,298.
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