The price of the DHN token plummeted by 50% after Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, sold the tokens he received at no cost, converting them into $125,000 worth of ETH.
In a single transaction, Buterin seems to have halved the price of the Dohrnii memecoin by liquidating tokens on the open market in exchange for Ethereum (ETH).
On Tuesday, March 18, on-chain analysis platforms revealed that Buterin offloaded 5,000 DHN for $125,000 in Ethereum on Uniswap. Despite this sale, he still retains another 5,000 DHN, valued at roughly $114,600, which he was given for free from the treasury of Dohrnii Labs on January 29, based on information from monitoring services.
In the wake of the drastic price fall, the Dohrnii team attempted to engage Buterin on social media, proposing to purchase his remaining DHN through an over-the-counter transaction to “reduce market volatility from future sales.” At this time, Buterin had not publicly responded to the proposal.
After the sell-off, a buyback occurred, causing DHN’s price to recover to its earlier levels. As of the latest updates, DHN is trading at $40, according to crypto price aggregators. However, this transaction has raised doubts about the token’s legitimacy, with some alleging that manipulation is at play.
One user on social media alleged that the price of DHN is “heavily manipulated” by the project’s creators and developers, who have complete control over the liquidity pool. They also expressed skepticism about the project’s fundamentals, noting that an educational app with just 1,000 downloads had inflated DHN’s market cap to $17 billion, while “having liquidity of less than a million.”
In its concise whitepaper, Dohrnii describes itself as an “educational tool” aimed at making financial literacy accessible to everyone. It claims to utilize blockchain technology, learn-to-earn features, and gamification to “revolutionize” the way individuals learn about finance, although it does not provide any technical specifics.