Vitalik Buterin Fires Back at Investors Criticizing His Decentralized Media Focus
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin just delivered a masterclass in ignoring the noise—and it’s ruffling Wall Street feathers.
The Pushback Heard ‘Round Crypto
Pressure was mounting. Big-money backers wanted more focus on financial products, higher transaction fees, anything to pump the quarterly numbers. But Buterin doubled down on his original vision: building decentralized social media and communication tools. No apologies, no pivot.
Why Media, Not Just Money?
The logic is brutally simple. Control the narrative, control the ecosystem. A decentralized Twitter or YouTube alternative isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s foundational infrastructure. It cuts out the corporate middlemen, bypasses censorship, and returns ownership to users. For Ethereum to be the world’s computer, it needs to host the world’s conversations, too.
The Investor Tantrum
Cue the backlash from the short-term profit crowd. Complaints flooded in: ‘Stop wasting time on non-revenue projects,’ ‘Focus on DeFi yields,’ ‘We need a bull market narrative, not a philosophy lecture.’ It was a classic clash of ideals versus spreadsheets.
Buterin’s Counterpunch
His response was pure crypto-punk. He didn’t justify or explain. He reiterated that Ethereum’s value isn’t defined by pleasing traditional VC playbooks. The network’s purpose extends far beyond being a fancy ledger for hedge funds to speculate on—a subtle jab at the ‘finance-first’ crowd who still don’t get the tech.
The Bigger Picture
This isn’t just internal drama. It’s a battle for the soul of the ecosystem. Will it become a slightly more efficient Wall Street, or something genuinely new? Buterin’s stance signals that the original, radical vision is still very much alive—even if it means telling some of his biggest supporters to take a hike. After all, since when did building the future require permission from those profiting from the present?
Vitalik made changes to fuel his decentralization agenda
The Ether developer mentioned several changes he made last year, including an “almost full” switch to Fileverse for document sharing, and a MOVE from Telegram to decentralized messaging applications Signal, Simplex, and Session.
This year, Buterin said he was shifting from Google Maps to OpenStreetMap and OrganicMaps, propounding that local mapping tools would effectively limit the number of entities that are tracking his physical location. He also replaced Gmail with ProtonMail, although he admitted it was best to use “proper encrypted messengers.”
Speaking on AI and local large language models, the Ethereum founder reckoned it was one area that still needed a lot of work. He noted that many capable local models exist, including phone-friendly versions, but lack cohesive interfaces.
“There isn’t a good “Google Translate equivalent” UI that plugs into local LLMs, transcription, audio input, search over personal docs. Comfyui is great, but we need Photoshop-style UX, and I’m sure that for each of those items, people will LINK me to various GitHub repos in the replies. But the whole problem is that there are various GitHub repos and not a one-stop shop,” he stated.
Even with its shortcomings, Buterin continued, local AI had advanced significantly over the past year. His ideal approach to solving the issues is to combine local processing with cryptographic techniques to limit data exposure when cloud resources are required.
Developer claims Buterin is running away from accountability
Responding to Buterin’s post, the pseudonymous founder of DeFi staking platform SharedStake ChimeraDefi.eth suggested the community should “bully him again” for pushing them to abandon services everyone uses for “esoteric tools.”
“He’s moving away from tools everyone uses to esoteric tools no one uses, so we’ll have to use Fileverse to read his work? Drastically lowering distribution? Why, bro?” they asked.
The developer also mocked Buterin’s switch from Telegram to Signal, and accused Ethereum leadership of poor communication compared with other blockchain figures who are actively communicating with users.
“Yes, all my drug dealers are on signal. All the bad small ones. The big Chinese ones aren’t… It’s ok, it’s not like you were very approachable or easy to talk to or helpful and communicative with the Ethereum community before anyway, so 0 times 0 is still zero. While other chains have leaders that try to be all of the above,” the staking platform engineer complained.
ChimeraDeFi.eth continued to say that Ethereum is successful because decentralization does not need individuals or founders to make decisions for the whole internet. Buterin responded by warning the community against using tools because of their popularity and not their principles.
“This is the mentality that created Liberty Reserve, which ultimately failed,” he pushed back, adding that resisting the need to chase mass-market tools that could be “slurping up all your data” is the “mentality that created Bitcoin.”
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