Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has outlined a "positive-sum" vision for meme coins, arguing that the current crop of meme-inspired cryptocurrencies do little more than "go up and down in price and contribute nothing of value in their wake."
In a recent blog post, Buterin argued that "many people feel uneasy" about the current crop of meme coins, and outlined how the "financialized games" that underpin them can be made to support public goods and charities.
He took aim at a recent wave of "openly super-racist" meme coins on blockchains such as Solana, adding that, "I have zero enthusiasm for coins named after totalitarian political movements, scams, rugpulls or anything that feels exciting in month N but leaves everyone upset in month N+1."
Dogwifhat Hits All-Time High, Flips Pepe as Meme Coins Soar
While the broader cryptocurrency market has been relatively flat, meme coins have been on a tear, with Dogwifhat leading the pack. The most popular Solana memecoin reached a new all-time high earlier today. Dogwifhat is a relatively new meme coin launched on the Solana ecosystem in November of last year. Despite being a newcomer, it has made a name for itself in the highly competitive meme coin space. Today, the coin started at $3.21, traded sideways until about 9am ET, then suddenly started to...
Buterin seemed to be referring to a rash of blatantly racist tokens that appeared on exchanges last week, many that used the n-word, a token called "Jews did 9/11," and "NAZI," which appears on exchanges with a swastika as its trading symbol.
"One answer to this conundrum is to shake our heads and virtue-signal about how much we are utterly abhorred by and stand against this stupidity," Buterin said. A more productive step, he argued, is to create a "more positive-sum version" of the whole concept of meme coins.
Buterin envisions meme coins being more like GiveWell Inu (which is no longer active), which promised to donate a portion of its proceeds to the Give Well organization.
Back in 2021, after Buterin had been gifted half the Shiba Inu (SHIB) supply he swapped them for Ethereum. After he'd done that, he sent $53 million worth of the ETH to Give Well. But the project seems to no longer be maintained.
Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin Wants Validators to Be More Decentralized
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin wants to improve decentralization on the Ethereum network by modifying its penalty system, he wrote in a recent blog post. And funny enough, he posted about it on Twitter after being asked by Elon Musk why he hasn't been using the platform. The Ethereum network uses a proof of stake consensus mechanism, where validators secure the network by staking ETH. In exchange for processing transactions, the validators earn rewards. But if they fail to do their job—acci...
Anticipating that his ideas might steal the fun of degens who enjoy taking a gamble on new meme coins, he suggested that developers build better Web3 games. He specifically put the spotlight on the 0xPARC organization, which has been responsible for games Dark Forest and FrogCrypto.
"I value people's desire to have fun," Buterin said, adding that, "I would rather the crypto space somehow swim with this current rather than against it."
Edited by Stephen Graves.
