Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Says He Feels 'Bad' for Solana

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has said that he doesn’t like the way U.S. regulators are targeting crypto projects—including his blockchains’s biggest rival, Solana.

“The one comment I’ll make is that I feel bad that Solana and other projects are getting hit in this way,” he wrote on Twitter Friday when asked by Paradigm co-founder Matt Huang about how he feels regarding America’s crypto policy approach.

“They don’t deserve it, and if Ethereum ends up ‘winning’ through all other blockchains getting kicked off exchanges, that’s not an honorable way to win, and in the long term probably isn’t even a victory.”

He added that real competition wasn’t other chains, but the “rapidly expanding centralized world that is imposing itself on us as we speak.”

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has launched a tough crackdown on the crypto industry this year, fining major exchanges like Coinbase, Binance, and Kraken.

One of the main reasons for the lawsuits is that SEC Chairman Gary Gensler believes that many exchanges are selling unregistered securities. Pooled staking products, like those that allow users to stake their Ethereum on the network and receive rewards, have come under fire.

The top regulator has said for years that most digital coins and tokens are unregistered securities—but that Bitcoin is a commodity. Although SEC Chair Gary Gensler hasn’t been clear on Ethereum, the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission (CTFC) has been. It's said that the asset is a commodity.

The SEC labeled SOL and a number of other cryptocurrencies as unregistered securities in its complaint against Binance this month.

Ethereum is the blockchain behind the second biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, ETH. Solana is an Ethereum competitor, and its native token SOL is the eleventh biggest digital asset.

Solana was created to speed up transactions in the decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible token (NFT) industries.