Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has spoken out against the recent trend of celebrities experimenting with cryptocurrencies by creating meme coins.
In a June 5 social media post, Buterin noted that most celebrity-backed meme coins lack practicality or concrete use cases to justify their creation.
He added that financialization – the process of turning something into a tradable asset – is only justified when it serves a purpose that brings value to society, such as improving healthcare, supporting open source software or promoting the arts.
Buterin believes that the primary goal of any project should be to give participants a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction, even if the project ultimately fails or the token loses value.
“The goal is to have a project that the average person who participates in would be happy with, even if all the tokens eventually went to zero. Regular companies and charities achieve this all the time. It's a low bar, but anything we build needs to meet this standard too.”
Approval Criteria
The Ethereum co-founder laid out a set of criteria that celebrity crypto projects must meet to earn his respect.
First, these assets need to serve the public good, not just enrich celebrities and early adopters. He gave the example of Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis' Stoner Cats NFT collection, saying that because the project funds an actual show, it's “much more prestigious” than other meme coins launched by celebrities this year.
Buterin further suggested that celebrity meme coins should incorporate attractive mechanisms such as decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) activity, which would encourage community participation and help the tokens grow beyond simple transactions.
Additionally, he stressed that these tokens should be designed to last for 10 years or more, rather than being traded for a few months and then easily forgotten.
Celebrity Meme Coin
Celebrity meme coins have become the new trend in the cryptocurrency industry in recent weeks, with superstars such as Caitlyn Jenner, Iggy Azalea and Davido issuing several tokens through the Solana-based Pump Fun application.
While the results of these experiments have been mixed, blockchain data shows that the asset has primarily benefited early traders who accumulated sizable positions. For example, blockchain analyst Lookonchain reported that an address associated with Nigerian record producer Davido made more than $470,000 in profits in just 11 hours.
Meanwhile, Iggy Azalea's Mother Iggy token continues to attract interest, having surged nearly 500% over the past seven days, according to data from CryptoSlate.
