Political Coins Represent ‘Vehicles for Unlimited Bribery,’ Warns Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin

Ethereum ( ETH ) founder Vitalik Buterin is concerned about the rise of “political coins,” memecoins such as MELANIA and TRUMP.

Buterin says the crypto sector has spent the past year entering “a new order” where people cheer on the idea of creating a token for anything at any scale.

“And so now is the time to talk about the difference between sugar-high short-term fun that is unwise to recommend to newbies, and long-term fulfillment and wealth-building. It is not about ‘fun is bad’, it is about the equivalent of modern hyperaddictive cellphone games, versus chess or World of Warcraft.

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.”

US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump both launched controversial new memecoins in the past week.

The Ethereum founder says the public should prioritize “the brightest possible vector” for the future of capital allocation mechanisms.

“The goal is not to indiscriminately accelerate everything, including superintelligent AI and fentanyl, the goal is to selectively accelerate defense so that it can keep up with offense. Sometimes, that defense is a matter of cultivating our own sense of virtue. Sometimes, that defense is a matter of creating better alternatives.

In DeFi, we are already starting to see a return toward honest token-based fundraising that gives users a clear understanding of what they are buying, bringing us the best of pre-2020-era Initial Coin Offerings while addressing their downsides.”

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