The DHN token price quickly dropped 50% after Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin sold off the tokens he received for free, exchanging them for $125,000 in ETH.

With a single trade, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin appears to have cut the Dohrnii memecoin’s price in half — dumping tokens on the open market in exchange for Ethereum (ETH).

On Tuesday, March 18, on-chain monitoring platforms showed that Buterin sold 5,000 DHN for $125,000 worth of Ethereum on Uniswap. Despite the sale, he still holds another 5,000 DHN, valued at around $114,600, which he received for free from Dohrnii Labs’ treasury on Jan. 29, according to data from Spot On Chain.

Following the sharp price drop, the Dohrnii team reached out to Buterin on X, offering to buy out his remaining DHN in an over-the-counter deal to “minimize market fluctuations from future sales.” As of press time, Buterin made any public statements regarding the offer.

After the sell-off, a buyback was recorded, and DHN’s price bounced back to previous levels. As of press time, DHN is trading at $40, per data from crypto price aggregators. However, amid the sale, concerns about the token’s legitimacy have surfaced, with some alleging manipulation.

One user on X alleged that that DHN’s price is “highly manipulated” by the project’s creators and developers who have full control over the liquidity pool. The user also raised doubts about the project’s fundamentals, highlighting that an educational app with only 1,000 downloads had pumped DHN’s market cap to $17 billion, but “has a liquidity less than a million.”

In its one-page whitepaper, Dohrnii calls itself an “educational tool” that wants to make financial education accessible to everyone. It says it uses blockchain, learn-to-earn features, and gamification to “transform” how people learn about finance, though it doesn’t get into any technical details at all.