Vitalik Buterin Unhappy About This Cycle’s Meme Coins: Here’s Why

Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of the Ethereum network, has expressed his unhappiness about the celebrity meme coin experiments in this bull cycle.

According to a tweet by the Canadian-Russian computer programmer, he would deem the meme coin projects more honorable and respectable if they had a public goal and were geared toward pushing specific causes in a better direction.

Celebrity Meme Coin Craze

Over the past few weeks, several celebrities, including Olympian and media personality Caitlyn Jenner, American rappers Rich The Kid and Iggy Azalea, and Nigerian musician Davido, have launched meme coins in an attempt to capitalize on the crypto craze for those assets.

While some market participants have made substantial sums from these meme coin launches, many users have incurred massive losses that wrecked their investments within a few hours of buying the tokens.

Jenner’s creation, JENNER, saw a trader who made millions from trading the Solana-based Book of Memes token lose 785 SOL worth roughly $133,400 within 24 hours. Similarly, many traders who invested in Davido’s DAVIDO were left in the red after the musician cashed out $474,000 from dumping his tokens less than 24 hours after launch.

Buterin kicked against celebrities using meme coins to target financialization as their final product rather than as a means to a worthy end, like healthcare and open-source software. The Ethereum co-founder insisted that the Stoner Cats non-fungible token collection launched by American actors and couple Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis in 2021 was more honorable than any projects seen in this cycle because the collectibles funded a show at least.

Launching Honorable Meme Coins

Highlighting an article he wrote in March about the potential of meme coins, Buterin outlined a few features such projects needed to possess to be deemed honorable and respectable. Besides enriching early adopters and celebrities, Buterin said the projects could have a public-good goal linked to an art project or the celebrity’s favorite charity.

In addition, they could be created to last at least a decade and have fun mechanics that go beyond trading, like token voting decentralized autonomous organizations.

“The north star should be: to have a project where even if eventually all tokens involved go to zero, the average person who participated is happy to have done so. Regular businesses and charities accomplish this goal all the time! It’s a low bar, but things we build should meet this bar as well,” the Ethereum co-founder explained.