Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said in a recent interview in China that decentralized social (DeSoc) solutions top the list of applications he most wants developers to build, followed by “smarter” DAOs.
Buterin noted that deviations from these goals were observed at the implementation level. A significant portion of the sector’s energy and capital was being transferred to products that did not create ‘social value’.
In an interview, Buterin summarized his current motivations under three “urgent” headings: The goal is to prevent cryptocurrencies from falling into a doomsday scenario and becoming 100% speculative, to further advance Ethereum technology, and to prevent the future from succumbing to a centralized AI-controlled order. According to Buterin, if the cryptocurrency ecosystem fails, there will be an increased risk that centralized AI will become dominant in the technology world. Therefore, cryptocurrencies act as a line of defense that protects “openness and freedom.”
Buterin noted that Ethereum has made significant progress in scaling over the past year (e.g. increasing gas capacity, deploying zkEVM, improving the wallet experience, etc.), but said his main concerns are with the application layer. He said decentralized technology could be reduced to products like “toys and casinos” if a large number of applications were created, but a significant portion of them lacked “real social meaning”.
Buterin illustrated this change in direction at the implementation layer with the meme coin boom. In an interview, he interpreted Donald Trump’s possible release of a meme coin in early 2025 as a sign of “where the industry has reached.” He argued that the emergence of the second token (Melania) would make the first token (Trump) “virtually irrelevant.”
The sudden rise and fall of meme coins associated with politicians is fueling a debate about market trust and reputation.
According to Buterin, the fundamental need on the part of DeSocial Security (DeSoC) is a social network that doesn’t lock users into a single platform. Provides portability and true ownership. In the case of DAOs (digital access vehicles), deeper thinking and more experimentation is required to design governance that aligns with the organization’s goals, rather than simply “taking a token vote and moving on.”
*This is not investment advice.
