Vitalik Buterin Cautions Against Political Meme Coins
2025-01-24
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Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin posted a cautionary screed about TRUMP, political meme coins, and the current state of the crypto industry.
He noted that Gensler left a regulatory loophole in differentiating governance tokens from securities, which has ushered in a wave of bad actors.
Buterin vs TRUMP: Fighting for Crypto’s Future
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, has displayed a growing anxiety about TRUMP and other political meme coins. In a lengthy social media post, Buterin highlighted a long-form vision of the crypto industry, claiming that “we have been entering a new order” for the last year.
He noted that crypto’s institutional acceptance has allowed bad actors to flourish:
“Now is the time to talk about the fact that large-scale political coins cross a further line: they are not just sources of fun, whose harm is at most contained to mistakes made by voluntary participants, they are vehicles for unlimited political bribery, including from foreign nation states,” Buterin claimed.
For Buterin, the launch of TRUMP was a watershed moment. Nearly 94% of tokens are held by 40 wallets, and scammers have already stolen close to $1 billion, leveraging the hype around TRUMP and MELANIA.
Typically, US Presidents cannot conduct private business in office. Therefore, Trump’s meme coin has created huge concerns, even outside the crypto industry.
However, Buterin did not lay all the blame upon Trump or any other high-profile meme coin issuer. He noted that former SEC Chair Gary Gensler created a loophole in securities laws by designating governance tokens as a potentially separate concept.
In Buterin’s view, Gensler “must never be christened as a hero, even among crypto skeptics,” due to this loophole.
The former SEC chair was widely criticized and despised by the crypto industry for his regulatory crackdowns, even after approving a Bitcoin ETF. Gensler never provided regulatory clarity or closed down the loopholes in current regulations.
However, with the benefit of hindsight, Buterin claims that crypto’s response of “part compliance, part rebellion” led directly to TRUMP. Still, he does see a way forward.
“There is a bright future of capital allocation mechanisms that can be built. Potentially, we can come up with ways to ensure alignment with community wishes as well as safeguarding important values like privacy, security, open standards and open source. Acceleration is coming either way; it is our task to choose the brightest possible vector,” he finished.
Buterin noted that the entire DeFi community has a responsibility to educate newcomers about long-term fulfillment and wealth-building, return towards honest token-based fundraising, and proactively defend the space against this self-destructive market logic.
He suggested a “techno-optimist” d/acc or “defensive acceleration” philosophy to move forward.