Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has issued a dual call to action, emphasizing the importance of ethical standards within cryptocurrency communities and urging cypherpunks to resist excessive control by governments and corporations. In a recent statement, Buterin reflected on the 2022 collapse of Terra Luna, highlighting why its ecosystem was not built on Ethereum. He stated it was "no coincidence" that Luna avoided Ethereum, suggesting the Ethereum community's culture is more cautious about harmful or risky projects compared to other ecosystems that may tolerate controversial backers or hype-driven tokens.
Buterin criticized the broader crypto community, including the Bitcoin community, for sometimes blindly supporting powerful figures without conditions, citing El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele's top-down Bitcoin adoption as an example. He warned that such uncritical support can be dangerous and that communities must actively oppose wrongdoing and promote ethical behavior to ensure long-term sustainability. The Terra Luna collapse, which erased over $40 billion in market value after its algorithmic stablecoin UST lost its peg, served as a stark confirmation of these warnings.
In a separate but related commentary, Buterin urged the cypherpunk and Ethereum developer community to defend user independence and self-sovereignty against encroaching institutional control. He described governments and corporations as entities that "control everything possible and resist control by others," citing the EU's simultaneous support for open-source software and push for 'Chat Control' backdoors in encrypted messaging as a prime example of this dual nature. Buterin emphasized that cypherpunks need not be hostile to institutions but must firmly protect core interests like building censorship-resistant systems on Ethereum.
Buterin identified stablecoins as a central battlefield in this struggle for control. He predicts governments will push harder for KYC and monitoring of stablecoin use, while privacy technologies like zero-knowledge proofs evolve in parallel. He believes institutions will favor self-custody and staking, supporting Ethereum's decentralization, but will also seek to retain control over their own stablecoin infrastructure. "At best, we can interoperate with the non-cypherpunk world to better bootstrap the cypherpunk world…Synergies like this should be explored across all domains," Buterin concluded.
