Vitalik Buterin has just reminded us of something the crypto industry forgets too fast: being open does not mean saying yes to everything. In a fairly broad interview, the Ethereum founder sets a clear limit. A community that applauds everything that drives the price up ends up shooting itself in the foot. Not immediately. But surely.
Buterin starts by pointing out that the Luna platform was not built on Ethereum by accident. For him, the Terra Luna collapse is not just a story about code or market. It is also a story of culture. Ethereum is open, yes, but there is a form of natural filtering: standards, a requirement, a way of viewing risk.
He insists on a point often misunderstood: in an open system, you cannot prevent all bad actions. However, you can avoid encouraging them. It seems obvious until a project promises 20% risk-free and everyone retweets.
Buterin describes crypto as a high variance space. There are brilliant, demanding people obsessed with technical elegance and, conversely, very fast opportunists, sometimes dangerous. The problem is not that they exist. The problem is when a community becomes known for welcoming them without asking questions.
Because at that point, reputation collapses. And in crypto, reputation is an invisible but vital asset. When you lose it, you no longer attract builders. You attract those who come to farm others’ trust. Buterin sums it up bluntly:
if you are too friendly, you don’t just attract builders, you also attract the worst profiles.
The Do Kwon case remains in everyone’s minds. Not because he is the only one, but because he symbolizes a scenario that repeats: hype, blindness, collapse, then the whole sector pays the credibility bill.
Where Buterin becomes really sharp is when he targets certain Bitcoin circles. He denounces a too common reflex: automatically celebrating any rich or powerful person as soon as they show support for Bitcoin, without ever questioning their methods or the use of that influence.
For him, this complacency ends up weakening the ecosystem, because it confuses promotion with legitimacy, exactly like when on-chain activity increases are taken as a “healthy” sign when they can also be fueled by opportunistic behaviors, as illustrated by the explosion of Ethereum activity linked to dusting attacks.
His example: Nayib Bukele and the adoption of Bitcoin in El Salvador by a top-down decision. For Buterin, some maximalists turned a blind eye to issues of public liberty and democracy because only one thing mattered: a country adopts Bitcoin. No matter the method.
And this is exactly what he denounces: forced adoption is fragile by nature. As long as the price goes up, it holds. As soon as the price falls and the constraint remains, it cracks. He says it clearly: when the price drops and adoption is imposed, the whole thing becomes unsustainable.
Buterin does not reject the idea of mass adoption. He rejects the way. For him, crypto works when people are convinced, not when they are forced. In the case of El Salvador, he believes that real usage did not take off as expected because the logic was reversed: we wanted to impose before persuading. And when volatility did its work, as always, adherence melted away. Normal: you don’t build lasting trust with an administrative obligation.
