Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has expressed his dissatisfaction with the current trend of celebrities issuing tokens.
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In recent days, the market has witnessed a wave of celebrities and influencers from various fields rushing to issue their own tokens. Leveraging the popularity and simplicity of token creation on the pump.fun platform, these influencers can easily create tokens and then promote them on their widely followed social media accounts.
The FOMO (fear of missing out) and support from fans have driven token prices up, bringing in quick profits for the influencers. However, the consequence is that gullible users become the “liquidity” without actually gaining any profits.
Of course, this trend has been continuously criticized by the community, and most recently, Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has also voiced his warnings.
I’m feeling quite unhappy about with “this cycle’s celebrity experimentation” so far. “Financialization as a means toward an end”, I can respect if the end is worthy (healthcare, open source software, art, etc). Financialization *as the final product*,
Ashton and Mila’s Stoner Cats was vastly more honorable than anything we’ve seen from this 2024 celebrity memecoin era – at least there was an actual show being funded.
Buterin mentioned Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis’s 2021 Ethereum-based NFT collection, Stoner Cats, as an example of celebrities entering the crypto space and creating real products. Despite the project facing an SEC lawsuit for allegedly selling unregistered securities, Stoner Cats still produced an animated series featuring its NFT characters.
Vitalik Buterin has been an active supporter of this project. He has also expressed that “memecoins have more utility than people think,” implying his support for the development of memecoins.
Therefore, Buterin’s criticism of memecoins issued by celebrities is entirely justified. Additionally, he has outlined some criteria for evaluating tokens issued by celebrities as follows:
- Having a good goal for the community, serving the community rather than just enriching celebrities and early buyers.
- Having some interesting mechanism rather than just being a token for trading back and forth. I wouldn’t support tokens used solely for voting in DAOs; at the very least, tokens should have utility for everyone and the organizations revolving around them. DAO is not the sole purpose; it’s just a part of it.
- Building something that lasts for at least 10 years, rather than just a few months before being forgotten.
